Author: Cara Giaimo / Source: Atlas Obscura
Andrei Sourakov, a lepidopterist at the Florida Museum of Natural History, is something of a bug paparazzo. Every time he passes a hollow tree with an opening he can reach, he sticks his camera inside, flips it upside-down, turns the flash on, and snaps a photo—just to see “what lurks there,” he says.
He is often surprised: Once, he interrupted about 100 mating stick insects. “They sprayed my camera with nasty stuff,” he remembers. “I became quite a bit more interested.”Other discoveries are somewhat less titillating. In 2010, Sourakov found a dozen moths, perched on the inside of a small sweetgum tree near the museum. They weren’t eating. They weren’t mating. They were just… resting. “When I zoomed in, they were all the same species”—a particular member of the genus Idia, he says. “I immediately thought, this must be some kind of specialized behavior.”
Over the next eight years, Sourakov kept returning to that tree, as well as another, a large red oak in San Felasco Hammock Preserve State Park. Often, he found moths: 60 of them, or 100, or once, over 400. Eventually, he collected his observations in a…
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