Clothes don’t get eaten by adult moths
Moths are winged Lepidoptera beside butterflies, often with dark or dull patterned wings. Once dumped in the paraphyletic Heterocera, they share complete metamorphosis: eggs near foliage, plant-eating caterpillars, then adults. Only larvae chew natural fibres—adults are innocent of your sweater.
Most caterpillars browse plants; a few, such as Eupithecia orichloris, turn insectivorous. Adults range every continent but Antarctica across wildly different terrestrial habitats. The butterfly–moth split is a folk convenience more than a clean clade.
Moths make up about 90 percent of Lepidoptera and 118 of its roughly 125 families, leaving only seven to butterflies. Around 160,000 species are described, over 1,000 lepidopterans are named each year, and the true total may approach 500,000. Large families include Erebidae, Noctuidae and Pyralidae. The English word descends from Old English moððe, with relatives in Old Norse motti and German Motte.
There is no strict rule separating them from butterflies, but antennae are a good guide: butterflies usually have thin ones ending in a club, whereas moth antennae tend to be feathery with no knob. Moths also carry more hair-like scales and mostly fly at night, though exceptions such as the cinnabar moth fly by day. Some females coat their eggs in nutrients or protective chemicals, and in the Lymantriinae cover them with irritating hairs.
A caterpillar eats its own eggshell on hatching, then feeds with chewing jaws and a hardened head, finding food with short antennae and simple eyes, and spins silk from a spinneret. Most pupate underground or under plant debris, some inside silk cocoons and some without. The pupa lies still inside a hard, glossy shell while metamorphosis runs, and night-flying species usually emerge in the late afternoon. New adults spend hours drying and stiffening their wings, and their main jobs are to reproduce and disperse.
Source: Moth
