A dive into the world of Moths, Butterflies, and the Human mind

When we hear the word 'moth,' an image of an ugly grey insect that somehow gets into our home on rainy evenings comes to mind, and the word 'butterfly' produces imagery of colorful flowers and breathtakingly beautiful cocoons. Here's the thing, though- moths are a PR crisis- because of no fault of their own. Moths are biologically classified as members of Glossata- the group with proboscises (the straw-like structure they use to feed)- which are not butteries.

Moths aren't that bad!

A good rule of thumb to distinguish between moths and butterflies is that moths rest with their wings spread out to their sides, and butterflies fold them above their backs.

Other non-absolute differences between them cover everything from wing coloration to body structure and eye-types. Butterflies have thin antennae and have a ball-like structure at the tip of the antennae, while moth antennae can be quite varied in appearance but lack the club end.

But the most exciting part has got to be the exceptions to the rules, the impostors among us, the out-of-box flies.

The Madagascan sunset moth looks like a butterfly due to the highly contrasting colors on its wings.

The Saturniidae moths are even more fascinating. While their caterpillars look like ferocious Martians with their ludicrously red horns that will plan their eggs in you, they are not harmful at all. The reason for this total-fire design choice is that they are huge (for caterpillars) and would look delicious to potential predators. Why are they so huge? Because the adult Saturniidae moth does not have a mouth and satisfies all its nutrition requirements from lipids that it had stored when it was at its day job as the devil's caterpillar. Consequently, the adult moth lives for about a week, and its only function is to mate.

On a closing note, I would like you to give some thought to the fact that without diving deep into this topic, all of us still had preconceived notions on the nature of moths and butterflies, leading to an inherent cognitive bias.

My (uneducated) theory is that our brains developed a system of bias long ago to speed up processing to attain an evolutionary benefit, maybe to keep our ancestors in tight groups they could trust, which continues to seep into our lives, and there's nothing we can do about it, except think deeply and educate ourselves.