Mind games, guardian angels, or possession by spirits from the underworld -- explaining the apparent faces on the backs of Glenoides texanaria and other moths. John Pickering Odum School of Ecology University of Georgia, Athens Halloween, 2015 Here I document apparent faces on Glenoides texanaria (Hulst, 1888) (Lepidoptera: Geometridae) and try to explain their existence. My goal is to engage the reader in understanding the scientific process and how we might explain a phenomenon that appears strange and remains a mystery. For fun and brevity, I define the markings on the moths as 'spirits' if they appear to have eyes and a mouth. I define moths that display or carry a spirit as 'possessed.' Thus, after presenting evidence to document spirits on possessed moths, our goal is to consider possible hypotheses that might explain them. Evidence -- The images presented are from Discover Life's mothing project, which since 2010 has photographed over 500,000 moths at 22 study sites in eastern North America and Costa Rica. For details on the project's overall methods and results, please see http://www.discoverlife.org/moth.   The image of the spirit on the left is an enlargement of the thorax of the possessed moth below. This particular moth was photographed on 1 October, 2015, near Athens, Georgia. The scale is in millimeters. Thus, the spirit's face is small, a little over a millimeter. You can click on the image below to enlarge it to full resolution. This species is commonly called the Texas Gray. It's one of the 25 species of grays in eastern North America listed by Covell (1984). It is in the moth subfamily Ennominae and has the scientific name Glenoides texanaria. Discover Life's species page links to over 1,700 photographs of this species (click on thumbnails), many of which are also possessed. For 28 similar enlargements of their spirits go to http://www.discoverlife.org/ghosts. Note how unique each spirit appears from the others. Some of the other species of grays are also possessed. For example, most specimens of the Dotted Gray, Glena cribrataria (Guenée, [1858]) are possessed (see images). Hypotheses -- Let's consider five hypotheses that might explain the spirits: Fraud -- Given the novelty of reporting spirits and that I write this just before Halloween, an explanation for the phenomenon is fraud. Were the spirits digitally edited onto the possessed moths, shall we say, in the spirit of the season? Science rules out fraud and anomalous findings with independent replication of its methods. In this case, you can find images of possessed G. texanaria and G. cribrataria on independent websites, such as Moth Photographers Group and BugGuide. If you are still unconvinced that G. texanaria, G. cribrataria, and some other species are possessed, you should study moths yourself. Have fun hunting for spirits and don't get spooked. They're harmless! Here's how. At dusk switch on your porch lights; at dawn photograph the moths that are attracted and resting nearby. Many newer models of smart phone cameras have the resolution that you need to document spirits. G. texanaria is a common moth. It ranges in the east from Massachusetts to Florida across to Wisconsin and Texas. For Georgia through Massachussets, Figure 1 shows that they are generally most abundant in July through October. In Florida they fly year round. Their host plant is unknown. One explanation for why possessed moths have not been recognized before is because recent advances in technology now enable us to study moths with high-resolution digital photography rather than by conventional entomological methodology--collecting, killing, and then stabbing specimens through their thoraxes with pins, thus destroying any spirit that each might possess. Happenstance -- nothing interesting is happening here. This is our NULL hypothesis. The moths might appear the way they do largely by chance. Unless we can reject this hypothesis with evidence, we should not accept the other possibilities below. Mind games -- It's all in your mind! These are not human-like faces but something else. "Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a stimulus (an image or a sound) wherein the mind perceives a familiar pattern of something where none actually exists." -- Wikipedia Guardian angels -- The spirits may in some way protect their moths, possibly by frightening away spiders and other natural enemies. Is it plausible that a small, potential predator might be tricked into avoiding a set of eyes and a mouth lurking on a cryptic moth? If so, spirits may have arisen as a case of aggressive mimicry warding off danger. Can you think of an experiment that you could do to test whether the spirits are guardian angels that help possessed moths survive longer than ones without a spirit?. Spirits -- Boo! -- Happy Halloween. We have no evidence to rule out the possibility that the spirits are in fact spirits from the underworld. As a scientist, one should keep an open mind until one has evidence to the contrary and can falsify this hypothesis. There are many mysteries that we cannot explain in our universe. For example, one of the greatest mysteries of astrophysics is dark matter, a hypothetical form of matter that cannot be seen with telescopes and that is estimated to account for nearly 85% of our universe's total matter. Undiscovered dimensions may also exist, possibly ones that may interact with the spirits. That said, the other hypotheses above seem more parsimonious, less fanciful explanations of spirits than invoking new dimensions and an underworld. As a thought provoking exercise, what might we do to study the underworld? While I sometimes talk to the moths, I do not hear any response from them, possibly because they communicate with ultrasounds at frequencies that bats and they can hear but I can't. So a start might be to improve my listening skills! Should we crowdsource the spirits and see if anyone recognizes any of them as deceased family members and friends? What would that tell us? Whatever you do, please enjoy the process of discovering and solving the many unknown mysteries of life, death, and the universe beyond, and maybe even beyond that. Or should I say, live your life to its fullest, before you possibly end up flying around with a moth! Reference Covell, C.V., Jr. 1984. A field guide to the moths of eastern North America. Houghton Mifflin C., Boston. 496pp.