Dahlia and Guest

Close observation of the plant kingdom reveals the constant coming and going of various life forms . . . life is everywhere.

Paul A. Meglitsch has written of the vast enormity of the invertebrate zoologist's world and studies. “If he (sic; or she) were to examine a different species every hour of an eight-hour day, the task would remain unfinished three hundred years later.

Today's photo, by John Karian, is an “ant's eye view” of a dahlia flower and its guest, an inchworm. An inchworm is not an actual worm (i.e. earthworm), but the name is given to the larvae of a certain family of moths: Geometridae. The zoologist's classification is Kingdom: Animal > Phylum: Arthropoda > Class: Insecta > Order: Lepidoptera > Family: Geometridae. In North America there are more than 1,200 different species of inchworm moths. Many of the moths that are attracted to house lights at night are in this family.

Possessing three pairs of true legs at the front, and two or three pairs of prolegs (larval appendages) at the rear, inchworms use a characteristic looping gait. Sometimes when disturbed they will camouflage themselves by standing erect and motionless like a small twig.

These larvae are also called measuringworms due to the appearance of their crawling habits. However, to be more technically modern, perhaps these days we should be using the name “centimeterworms”.

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