From the news · Citizen science · January 2025

A visitor's phone photo found a moth unseen since 1959

In March 2024 Pav Johnsson, a visitor from Sweden, photographed a large moth on Stewart Island at the southern end of New Zealand and shared it on iNaturalist. It turned out to be the Frosted Phoenix, Titanomis sisyrota, a species last recorded in 1959 and feared extinct. Johnsson's picture is the first photograph of a living one; until then the moth was known only from eight museum specimens. Out of about 50 million observations shared on iNaturalist in 2024, Johnsson's was the most popular in the world, and moth specialist Robert Hoare called it the greatest moth or butterfly find in the history of iNaturalist in New Zealand.

Source: Te Papa (Museum of New Zealand) blog, 2025-01-29

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