Darwin’s Hawkmoth

The giant hawkmoth, endemic to Madagascar, was discovered in 1882. Its existence, however, was predicted 20 years earlier—and nearly 5,700 miles away—by Charles Darwin, as he sat in his London office inspecting an unusual Star-of-Bethlehem orchid sent by a colleague. The specimen featured a foot-long nectar spur, with the nectar itself pooled only at the very bottom. “Good Heavens,” Darwin wrote in a letter to a friend, “what insect can suck it?”

Darwin declared that scientists would one day discover the orchid’s co-evolutionary partner: an insect with a foot-long proboscis. Two decades later, they did just that, documenting a subspecies of African hawkmoth that handily demonstrates Darwin’s theory of coevolution, by which the development of two species is driven or modified by the other.

The Academy’s first Darwin’s hawkmoth is mounted alongside a star orchid. “It enables us to discuss the coevolution of plants and their pollinators,” says Senior Entomology Collections Manager Norman Penny. “And it reminds people that we can’t make even selective cuts in a forest without breaking down the web of life that exists in that environment.”