It is also a beautiful cross between a cicada, a moth, and a glass winged butterfly. The Pellucid Hawk Moth, Cephonodes hylas, or Coffee clearwing, is a moderately large species of moth. Pellucid Hawkmoth Distribution, Habitat, and Ecology Source: In short, this is a beautiful moth worth spotting. The abdomen is somewhat tapered in shape and can be yellow, green, or orange. In adult individuals, the thorax is habitually also bright green. The legs and face are usually a light gray in color, and head and spiracles – mostly dark blue.īroad bands of yellow and red with a dark edging cross the body of the insect, which is stout in shape and reminds of the body of the bumblebee. The caterpillar is a beautiful bright green. They commonly possess black edging, as well as thin black veins throughout them.

The wings are an unusual triangular shape and wispy thin. Most interestingly, the wings are transparent and reflect most light (creating antireflection) which makes the species difficult to see. Luna Moth White Ermine Comet Moth Source: ĬC License: Pellucid Hawk Moth Physical DescriptionĬephonodes hylas can possess a wingspan of up to 3 in (7.5 cm). Its greatest threat, however, obviously comes in the form of the ongoing effects of climate change. Habitat loss naturally poses a possible danger. The beautiful Lepidoptera nonetheless faces the same potential threats as many other species around the world.The IUCN, therefore, presently has no listing for it. This further appears to be true throughout the entirety of its range. For the moment, at least, the Pellucid Hawkmoth appears to b maintaining a sizeable and stable population base.The Swedish zoologist and botanist Carl Linnaeus made the first official recognition of it as a separate and distinct species. It actually shares its place in the annals of science with many others species, due to who recognized it.That’s because it’s the somewhat hard to pronounce term of Cephonodes hylas. Their name for it, though, isn’t nearly as simple to pronounce as the others that it goes by. Scientists, meanwhile, know it by quite a different term, as is the norm.These include the terms of the coffee clearwing and the coffee bee hawkmoth. The marvel of Nature also goes by several alternates, however. The unique term of Pellucid Hawkmoth serves as the most frequently used common name for this moth.This, they suggest, would make the wings nearly imperceptible to other insect and vertebrate predators and parasites, which make them the ultimate invisibility cloaks. Publishing in the journal Zoological Science, they found that, compared with the fake moth wing, the real transparent beauties decreased the light reflectance by almost 50 percent across a broad range of light spectra. To test this theory, Yoshida’s team created a smooth pellucid hawk moth wing by wiping its protuberances away without damaging its delicate structure, and compared how it reflected light beside a real hawk moth wing. Being so similar physically, could these two surfaces serve the same function? In 2006, a team led by Akihiro Yoshida from the Yuhki Science School in Kyoto, Japan, discovered that the transparent wings of the pellucid hawk moth contained on their surface “ a highly ordered array of nanosized protuberences“, which they compared to what’s known as a ‘ corneal nipple array‘ – the countless bumps on the surface of an insect’s eye that reduce reflectance. Having observed them at a nanoscale, researchers suspect the point is to achieve ‘ antireflection‘ – minimising the shine produced by a surface when the light hits it.

So, you might be wondering what the point of them is, when coloured wings can serve so many functions, including communication, defence, thermoregulation, feeding, and waterproofing.

Just a handful of species in order Lepidoptera, which includes all butterflies and moths, have scaleless, transparent wings. The largest of the species will develop a wingspan of over 7cm. Together with their green, yellow, or orange abdomens, banded in black, these clear, wispy wings give them the appearance of a great big bumblebee – hence the nickname of their genus, ‘the bee hawks’. When a pellucid hawk moth first emerges from its cocoon, the scales obscuring its stunning pair of transparent wings will begin to drop off, eventually revealing the species’ most distinctive trait. Locally, these caterpillars will snack on our native butterfly ( Pavetta australiensis) and banana bushes ( Ervatamia angustisepala), and the leaves of our introduced gardenia plants until they’re fat enough to construct a cocoon and undergo the rather gooey process of metamorphosis.

Pellucid hawk moth