Moth at cinder block…

A terrible photo, but all I had at the moment was my cell phone and this is possibly a “new-for-me” moth. The farthest I can usually hope to ID moths is “family,” and my guess is this is in the Geometridae family.

» ID’ed at BAMONA as Iridopsis humaria or “Small Purplish Gray” (in Geometridae).
» ID’ed at BugGuide to genus.
If BugGuide agrees that this is a Small Purplish Gray, it will be the first documented in Illinois outside the months of March and April » see BugGuide data.

Number of moth species?
From the Smithsonian Institution, “There are some 160,000 species of moths in the world, compared to 17,500 species of butterflies. In the United States, there are nearly 11,000 species of moths. … With some 15,000 described species, [the Geometridae] Family is the second largest of moths in the world.”

Number of butterflies species?
From the Smithsonian Institution: “There are about 17,500 species of butterflies in the world, and around 750 species in the United States.”

So according to the Smithsonian Institution, moth species outnumber butterfly species by a factor of about 9-to-1.

[ IMG_20191021_145904863TsS9x675Tstm :: cell phone ]