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moths

By adamg - 12/9/08 - 2:46 pm

Billions and billions of frenzied male winter moths flying into your car, your house, your mouth as they try to shack up with their flightless female counterparts anxiously awaiting them in their tree lairs. And now the imported European moths may be mating with a native moth species. Run away! Our resident invasive-species expert, Jennifer Forman Orth, explains, in somewhat calmer tones:

... The Elkinton Lab at UMass Amherst has found evidence that the introduced moths have been hybridizing with a similar-looking but less common native species, the Bruce spanworm moth (Operophtera bruceata). The lab continues to study this phenomenon and the impact it could have on the native species as well as on efforts to establish a biological control for winter moths in our state.

By adamg - 8/18/06 - 5:46 pm

Pazzo Books in Roslindale is offering a $5 credit to the first person who brings in a female adult cankerworm.

You may know them better as winter moths - except that it's the males that fly around en masse in winter, since the females are wingless and pretty much sit around waiting to get serviced so that they can then pop out roughly 89 trillion gazillion bazillion eggs, all of which hatch in the spring and then commit suicide in our pool.

By adamg - 7/8/06 - 10:12 am

Jennifer Forman Orth, an invasive plant ecologist with the UMass-Boston biology department, has a leaf to pick with Mitt Romney and Howie Carr over their snickering about proposed funding for a program to do something about winter moths:

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