Beautiful Wood Nymph

Eudryas grata

June 12, 2012

Love this bird dropping mimic - guess it's sort'a kind'a beautiful. In my book "Discovering Moths..." I posited that perhaps it resembles the droppings of a bird that ate grapes because the larvae feed on grapes. This could make the adults' cryptic pattern and color more convincing next to the real thing when they are in that habitat (splattered with grapey bird droppings) laying eggs. This could also be why many of the moths whose larvae feed on dead leaves look like dead leaves. 

The larvae of E. grata do feed on other plants (Virginia Creeper, buttonbush) that do not have purple berries, though, so who knows...