Moth pupa banks, adult eclosion triggers, and flight patterns

John Pickering 1+2 & Alex Cherkinsky 1
1 University of Georgia, Athens
2 Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas
http://www.discoverlife.org/who/Pickering,_John.html

Discover Life's Mothing project aims to understand how
weather and other factors affect moth communities. 
We present (1) nightly flight patterns of selected
species at a site in Clarke County, Georgia and
(2) 14C bomb-pulse radiocarbon dating measurements
of how many years saturniid moths spend as pupae.
We suggest that adult eclosion triggers and temperature
driven development rates both affect flight patterns.
We conclude that it is impossible to understand adult
population dynamics of many holometabolous insects
without a much better knowledge of the genetic and
environmental factors that determine their pupal
behavior.