Cocytius antaeus

Cocytius antaeus, the giant sphinx, is a moth of the family Sphingidae. The species was first described by Dru Drury in 1773.

"Giant sphinx" redirects here. For the statue, see Great Sphinx of Giza.

Giant sphinx
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Lepidoptera
Family: Sphingidae
Genus: Cocytius
Species:
C. antaeus
Binomial name
Cocytius antaeus
(Drury, 1773)[1]
Synonyms
  • Sphinx antaeus Drury, 1773
  • Sphinx annonae Shaw, 1802
  • Sphinx hydaspus Cramer, 1777
  • Sphinx iatrophae Fabricius, 1775
  • Sphinx medor Stoll, 1782
  • Amphonyx tapayusa Moore, 1883
  • Cocytius henrici Pinchon, 1969

Distribution

It is found from Brazil through Central America and into the southern parts of California,[2] Texas, and Florida in the United States.

Description

The wingspan is 126–178 mm. Very rare in North America, it was once thought to be the only insect in the continent with a long enough proboscis to pollinate the similarly rare ghost orchid.

  • Male dorsal
  • Male ventral
  • Female dorsal
  • Female ventral

Biology

The larvae feed on Annona glabra, Annona reticulata, Annona purpurea, Annona holosericea and Rollinia membranacea.[3]

gollark: * then → also
gollark: I'd probably go for having a mixed dataset of longer chatlog chunks, and then single lines of my messages so it would know what "gollark" is.
gollark: I do not think this is permitted by the privacy policy.
gollark: The only people who actually use IRC are random open source software people, so they're very biased to that.
gollark: I have some public IRC logs for training better chatbots stored somewhere, but they're not very big.

References
  1. "CATE Creating a Taxonomic eScience - Sphingidae". Cate-sphingidae.org. Retrieved 2011-11-01.
  2. Giant Sphinx in CA
  3. "Silkmoths". Silkmoths.bizland.com. 2011-01-31. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2011-11-01.


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