''Elachista saarelai'' is a

moth Moths are a paraphyletic group of insects that includes all members of the order Lepidoptera that are not butterflies, with moths making up the vast majority of the order. There are thought to be approximately 160,000 species of moth, many of w ...

of the family Elachistidae that is endemic to southern

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...

.Elachista saarelai sp. n. (Lepidoptera, Elachistidae: Elachistinae), a new species from southern Finland
/ref> The

wingspan The wingspan (or just span) of a bird or an airplane is the distance from one wingtip to the other wingtip. For example, the Boeing 777–200 has a wingspan of , and a wandering albatross (''Diomedea exulans'') caught in 1965 had a wingspan of ...

is for males and for females. The larvae feed on ''

Carex digitata ''Carex digitata'', finger sedge, or fingered sedge is a species in the genus ''Carex ''Carex'' is a vast genus of more than 2,000 species of grass-like plants in the family Cyperaceae, commonly known as sedges (or seg, in older books). Other ...

'' and possibly '' Carex pediformis''. They

mine Mine, mines, miners or mining may refer to: Extraction or digging * Miner, a person engaged in mining or digging *Mining, extraction of mineral resources from the ground through a mine Grammar *Mine, a first-person English possessive pronoun ...

the leaves of their host plant.

References

saarelai Moths described in 2010 Endemic fauna of Finland Moths of Europe {{Elachista-stub