The Clothes-Moth.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20234, 19 February 1934, Page 6

The Clothes-Moth.

Nature Notes

By

James Drummond,

F.L.S., F.Z.S.

FEMALE of the common clothes-moth may lay on the average between forty and seventy oval, opalescent, ivory-yellow, very fragile eggs, less than one twentyfourth of an inch long, on the surface of a fabric, between strands of wool or at the base of hairs in a fur or a skin. No sooner do grubs hatch from the eggs than they begin to feed. Their feeding causes all the mischief. As the contents of their intestines show through their translucent skins they take the colour of the stuff they feed upon. Fully-grown grubs are about three-eighths of an inch long They will eat not cloth alone, but also hair, wool, furs, feathers, dead insects, skins and cobwebs. They will attack living young ticks and will take ticks’ eggs. On becoming fully grown a grub spins a cocoon, wraps itself up in it like a blanket, lies there, dead to the world, and changes into a chrysalis, remaining in that state for about seventeen days. Metamorphosis having been completed inside the cocoon, the winged moth pushes out, usually leavmg the old husk of the chrysalis skin protruding from the cocoon. This is the life-history of this troublesome insect, as recorded bv Major E E Austen keeper of the Department of Entomology , n the British Museum, and Mr A. W Hughes, in a pamphlet published by the museum, which is doing useful work m economic entomology. The common clothes-moth has been brought to New Zealand, where it is plentiful and destructive.