We enjoy watching moths and butterflies fluttering around flowers, landing on them to feed on their nectar. By feeding in this way, they pollinate countless plants. Not all moths fit this peaceful image, however, as some species feed on blood instead.
Calyptra
The blood-sucking Calyptra moth1,2 sneaks up on its sleeping victim like a tiny flying vampire. It then pierces the skin with its cruel proboscis covered in teeth and claws. While feeding on its victim’s blood, it is firmly attached to their skin using pneumatic hooks located at the tip of its feeding tube.
Blood-feeding moths feed on a range of hosts, including humans, cattle, zebu, elephants, and rhinoceroses. Electron microscope images of their mouthparts reveal that the tip is reinforced for piercing, while the sides are lined with hooks for tearing and spikes for scraping. The moth uses these structures to rupture blood vessels, creating a pool of blood beneath the skin from which it can feed.
This might give the impression that these moths were purposefully designed for blood-feeding. In reality, this is not the case. The Calyptra moth developed these features to feed on fruit.3
Out of 150 moth species in the Calpini tribe, only about 10 feed on blood. The rest feed exclusively on fruit. Since most have no contact with blood, the hooks and spikes on their mouthparts are likely used for something else — essentially, for making a fruit cocktail. The pneumatic hooks help widen the opening, allowing the moth to drink more juice.
They feed on strawberries, raspberries, grapefruits, oranges, cherries, and even tough-skinned fruits like lychees and longans. If these moths were better known for their fruit-based diet, their sharp mouthparts might not seem so predatory. The hooks and spikes are there to extract juice from fruit. That was their original function. But they can also be used to pierce skin and feed on blood. Why?
An explanation
When their main food sources are unavailable, moths and butterflies can feed on faeces, sweat, carrion, wounds, and even tears. Since evolutionary theory presents death as a normal part of life,4 it may seem that sharp teeth or claws were made for eating meat or drinking blood.
Yet there are no structural differences between the mouthparts of fruit-feeding and blood-feeding moths.5 They were equipped with tools originally suited to eating fruit, but they use them to drink blood when fruit is not available. The same idea applies to other predators alive today. According to this view, all of them were originally herbivores.6
By the way, we recommend reading the articles:
- The Zenni Method
- Shrinking Shrews Versus Evolution
- Tracing the Origins of Metabolic Pathways
- Natural Selection – Truth or Fiction?
- Did Dragons Exist in the Middle Ages?
Footnotes
- Plotkin, D. and Goddard, J., 2013. Blood, sweat, and tears: a review of the hematophagous, sudophagous, and lachryphagous Lepidoptera. Journal of Vector Ecology, 38(2), pp. 289–294.
- Zaspel, J. M. et al., 2014. Geographic distribution, phylogeny, and genetic diversity of the fruit- and blood-feeding moth Calyptra thalictra Borkhausen (Insecta: Lepidoptera: Erebidae). Journal of Parasitology, 100(5), pp. 583–591.
- Zaspel, J. M. et al., 2016. Host-related olfactory behavior in a fruit-piercing moth (Lepidoptera: Erebidae) in Far Eastern Russia. Journal of Insect Science, 16(1), p. 51.
- Guliuzza, R. J., 2020. Survival of the fittest and evolution’s death culture. Acts & Facts, 49(1), pp. 17–19.
- Zaspel, J. M., Weller, S. J. and Branham, M. A., 2011. A comparative survey of proboscis morphology and associated structures in fruit-piercing, tear-feeding, and blood-feeding moths in Calpinae (Lepidoptera: Erebidae). Zoomorphology, 130(3), pp. 203–225.
- The Bible, New King James Version, 1982, Genesis 1:29-30; Criswell, D., 2009. Predation Did Not Come from Evolution. Acts & Facts, 38(3), p. 9.
Adapted from: S. Arledge, Rogue moths didn’t start out that way, Acts & Facts, Institute for Creation Research, December 2020, p. 9.
© Source of main image: Canva.
The portal EvolutionOfThinking.org, created by the Research and Education Institute, focuses on education and the dissemination of knowledge related to research on various aspects of human well-being.
