This is the moth I completed my PhD research on - I was looking at variation in warning signals (The orange spots against the black) and found that the spot number and size are really variable, and not something you can count on for identification of this species.

It's been commonly referred to as the 'White antennae wasp moth', but this descriptor could apply to many Amata in Australia. I've been calling it the Red-necked wasp moth, because the orange ruff around its neck is redder that the orange elsewhere on its body. Again, this might not be an accurate descriptor to separate it from other Aussie Amata.

Distribution: According to iNat, ALA and the museum collections I've visited, this species rage stretches from Victoria, throughout New South Wales, and as far north as Brisbane in Queensland.

Morphological description: Amata nigriceps has white-tipped black antennae. There are some white scales that run along the underside of the antennae, but these aren't always noticeable without a macro camera or magnifying lens.

A. nigriceps has a pale orange frons, or forehead, the rest of the head is black with reduced, short palps, and large black eyes. It has a black, curled proboscis. It has a smart reddish-orange neck scarf, and a plain black thorax with long black scale-hairs on the shoulders.

This moth has an orange trapezoidal-shaped ventral patch on its first abdominal segment, and alternating black and orange stripes along its abdomen. Males have 6 orange abdominal stripes and females have 5. The male abdomen terminates in a ventral orange tuft of long scale hairs, which sits over a black tuft of dorsal black scale hairs. The female abdomen terminates on an orange stripe - the scale hairs fold inwards, a bit like a donut. She uses these hairs when she lays eggs to secure and protect them.

A. nigriceps has blueish-black wing scales (The blue actually flashes iridescently at certain directions of light), with pale-orange wings spots, that are almost transparent. Their wing span is around 30-40mm long, and they have black legs, but the forelegs have some white scales along the front.

Known ecology: These moths are bivoltine (two generations per year) and over-winter as larvae. They have been known to feed upon a few different plants, and I have raised them myself on both rose petals and dandelion leaves. However, they prefer these food stuffs to be decaying and I suspect they feed on rotting plant leaf-litter and are what we call 'polyphagous', and will eat a bunch of things.

Genital morphology: This is where things start getting tricky. I puled out 70+ genitals of A. nigriceps during my PhD and found stark contrasts within and between populations. This gives me some idea that I'm actually seeing 'cryptic speciation'- species that look really similar and also hang out in the same distributions or populations, and one might have evolved from the other and they're closely related.

Let's look at some gennies to try and understand the differences.

See those things that look like clamps? They hold on to the female during mating! The top part are called valva and the bottom of the clamp is called the coastal process. I have also dissected the aedeagus out, which is essentially the moth's penis.

I ran a quick comparison with a couple of moths from this same location, and it seems like these could be two different species - the CO1 gene varies between the two, and the moths with the longer aedeagus also seem to have a longer wingspan! Besides the obvious joke here, there definitely needs to be more work done on this species to figure out how many different A. nigriceps there are, and whether they are separate species or subspecies. I also don't have enough females to do proper comparisons across populations.

Watch this space!