Hawkmoths of EWS

HAWKMOTHS OF EAGLENEST WILDLIFE SANCTUARY

Hawkmoths are easy to distinguish from species of other moth families even on a screen thereby reducing sampling effort in the field.

Sphingids have been the targets of considerable taxonomic studies and we have a better knowledge of their geographical distributions, compared to other families, largely through
the on-going efforts of Ian Kitching and his team of collaborators (Kitching 2017).

We were able to assign individuals to taxonomic species in most cases because Sphingidae identification is relatively easy due to the large amount of available literature and type-specimen inventories. Where we were not confident of our identifications, we assigned individuals to morpho-species. We relied chiefly on the following reference material for identification:

Moths of Thailand Vol. 2 Sphingidae, H. Inoue, R.D. Kennett & I.J.Kitching (MOT)
Moths of Borneo J.D. Holloway (MOB)
Sphingidae Taxonomic Inventory http://sphingidae.myspecies.info (STI)
Sphingidae of the eastern Palaearctic http://tpittaway.tripod.com/china/ (SOTEP)
Sphingidae of Southeast- Asia https://www.sphin-sea.unibas.ch/ (SSA)

Acherontia lachesis

Black basal patch on upper hind wing, though not always visible when sitting. See A. Styx for separation from that species. We have assumed that all others are this species and not A. atropos, which is restricted to Africa.