This rather common moth has spectacular colors. It mimics wasps with its orange and black banded body, and even though I know it’s a moth, still something in me says be careful. No question, this small animal is harmless.
You can find A. huebneri according to iNaturalist in the whole South East Asia region, plus Nigeria (wow!) and the North-east of Australia.
There’s a unbelievable number of 180.000 species in the order Lepidoptera. 160.000, almost 89% of those are moths, and only 20.000 are butterflies. 134 species alone can be found in the genus Amata. They are commonly called tiger moths, but ours is the wasp moth. A general help to distinguish moths from butterflies is to look at the antennas. Butterflies have thin antennas with club-like ends. Our moth has also thin antennas, but the white tips have no club. It seems to be active during daytime.
Like many times before, the wasp moth also brought me to the 19th century, and some remarkable people of those times.
Our moth is named after Jacob Huebner. The French lepidopterist Jean Baptiste Alphonse Déchauffour de Boisduval described it as Syntomis hübneri in 1829, and there are eight more synonyms listed for the species. So far so good, but one fact made me smile for a while.
Huebner was a German copper engraver and an entomologist. Boisduval named the moth after his friend and copper engraver. The German poet and translator Friedrich Johann Michael Rückert and his friend Carl Barth, who was also a copper engraver, started the idiom in German “Freund und Kupferstecher”, and Huebners wasp moth made me discover a second very similar friendship. Mein Freund und Kupferstecher! Rückerts letters to Barth are from the same time, the beginning of the 19th century. I wonder what came first. But.
Hans-Ulrich Wagner published some remarks on the idiom, claiming that in these letters actually Rückert never used those words. But there are third parties from the 19th century reporting his habit of calling Barth his friend and engraver. I tried to find his letters to Barth, but couldn’t find it. Many original letters from Rückert are available (and sold for some thousand Euros!), but not what I wanted. Still it seems sometime somewhere Rückert called Barth his friend and engraver, and still here in 2024 we remember that idiom.
You’re asking what makes these men remarkable?
Huebner was really into butterflies and moths, he illustrated 3598 lepidopterans on a total of 1952 copper plates.
Rückert worked in 44 languages, and translated for example parts of the Quran.
Boisduval was co-founder of the Société entomologique de France, and one of the most important lepidopterists in France.
And Chirotherium barthii was the first ever dinosaur footprint fossil, named using Linnaeus’ binomial system. It was named after Carl Barth, who helped to recover it. The name translates to “Barths hand beast”!
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