RALEIGH The N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services is expected to start treatments June 3 for a gypsy moth infestation in a 2,080-acre block near the Lamsburg community in Surry County. Bryant Road goes through the middle, with Interstate-77 running along the eastern edge of this block. There are 163 residences in the area. In 2019, a male moth was captured in this block. In 2020, 25 gypsy moths were captured, signifying that a reproducing population is present. One application of mating disruption is planned. “Treatments are weather dependent, but they are timed to happen prior to normal gypsy moth mating periods,” said Allison Ballantyne, NCDA&CS Gypsy Moth program manager. “If weather conditions are suitable, the planned treatment is expected to take a day.”
The Silver Bridge. The two books, however, are very different in many ways. Before I get to the books, here’s a bit of background on the saga of Mothman. There can be few people reading this who have not at least heard of the legendary Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, who so terrorized the town and the surrounding area between November 1966 and December 1967, and whose diabolical exploits were chronicled in the 2002 hit Hollywood movie starring Richard Gere:
The Mothman Prophecies, so named after the book of the same title written by Mothman authority John Keel. A winged monster with glowing, red eyes, Mothman’s appearance came quite literally out of nowhere and, some say, culminated in high tragedy and death. But what was the Mothman of Point Pleasant? And how did the legend begin? To answer those questions we have to go back to the dark night of November 12, 1966, when five grave-diggers working in a cemetery in the nearby town of Clendenin were shocked to see wha
There can be few people reading this who have not at least heard of the legendary Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, who so terrorized the town and the surrounding area between November 1966 and December 1967, and whose diabolical exploits were chronicled in the 2002 hit Hollywood movie starring Richard Gere:
The Mothman Prophecies, so named after the book of the same title written by Mothman authority John Keel. A devil-like, winged monster with glowing, red eyes, Mothman’s appearance came quite literally out of nowhere and, some say, culminated in high tragedy and death. But what was the Mothman of Point Pleasant? And how did the legend begin? To answer those questions we have to go back to the dark night of November 12, 1966, when five grave-diggers working in a cemetery in the nearby town of Clendenin were shocked to see what they described as a “brown human shape with wings” rise out of the thick, surrounding trees and soar off into the distance.
The following is an article about sex-crazed gypsy moths.
For those of you who are still with us, the U.S. Forest Service is taking public comments on a program â which it more discreetly describes as a âmating disruption treatmentâ â to eradicate an invasive species that feeds voraciously on foliage.
Gypsy moths also have a big appetite for sex. And unprotected moth sex leads to caterpillars, which have stripped oak trees and other hardwoods of their leaves in Southwest Virginia and beyond.
To protect the trees, the Forest Service is taking a family-planning approach to a problem that starts with the female gypsy mothâs inability to fly.
Shutterstock/Matee Nuserm
An Asian-Australian moth becomes more sexually active under red light than under another colour of light or in the dark.
Dim red light appears to stimulate chemical changes in the antennae of male yellow peach moths (
Conogethes punctiferalis), making them more sensitive to the smells emitted by nearby females. This increases their copulation rates, says Wei Xiao at Southwest University in Chongqing, China.
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Xiao and his colleagues made the accidental discovery while studying the general behaviour of the moths, which invade orchards and spice farms across Asia and Australia.
To mimic natural light conditions in their laboratory, the scientists kept the lights on for 15 hours and turned them off for 9 hours per day. When they needed to work with the moths during the hours of darkness, they turned on red lights because scientists generally assume that insects can’t see red and react negligibly to it, says Xiao.