one of many

Recently, on a walk through the woods at Ijams Nature Center with Karen Sue Barker, we found a dead moth lying among the leaves. Picking it up, I knew I had never seen anything like it so I brought its lifeless corpselet home to pin and dry. It’s small, that's what makes it a corpselet (my word, it's not in any dictionary) with a wingspan of about 1.5 inches and eight bright spots—four yellow, four white—against its black wings.

We looked it up and discovered it was an eight-spotted forester (Alypia octomaculata) first given a scientific name in 1775 by Danish entomologist and economist Johan Christian Fabricius.

But here’s the thing. The forester turns out to be in the insect family "Noctuidae" or owlet moths. Owlet moths? I’d never heard of such a thing, which is something of a surprise since I grew up in the woods and to date there are more than 35,000 known species of the robustly built moths flying around; possibly as many as 100,000 species altogether worldwide.

You're kidding, 35,000 known species! That’s a lot. How could I have overlooked them?

The reason: Scientists believe that there are at least three million and perhaps as many as ten million separate species of life on planet Earth. Naturalist and retired physics professor Chet Raymo writes that, "There are not enough biologists alive to make sense of it all." Indeed!

In other words, you could spend your entire lifetime trying to learn all of just the owlet moths and die long both you completed the task. And, to date, Karen Sue and I know the name of only one: eight-spotted forester. That leaves 34,999 more known species to comprehend.