''Plusia'' is a
genus
Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nom ...
of
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 ...
s of the family
Noctuidae. The genus was erected by
Ferdinand Ochsenheimer
Ferdinand Ochsenheimer (17 March 1767 – 2 November 1822) was a German stage actor, actor and entomologist (lepidopterist).
Life
Ochsenheimer was born and brought up in Mainz (then in the Electorate of Mainz) and began to show an interest in ...
in 1816.
Description
Palpi upturned, where the second joint reaching vertex of head. Antennae of male ciliated. Thorax with a very large spreading tuft on the vertex. Abdomen with three large dorsal tufts on basal segments, and lateral and anal tufts more or less strongly developed in male. Forewings hooked at outer angle. Larva with two pairs of abdominal prolegs.
Species
* ''
Plusia contexta''
Grote, 1873
* ''
Plusia festucae''
Linnaeus, 1758 - gold spot
* ''
Plusia magnimacula''
D. Handfield & L. Handfield, 2006
* ''
Plusia manchurica''
Lempke, 1966
* ''
Plusia nichollae''
Hampson, 1913
* ''
Plusia putnami''
Grote, 1873
* ''
Plusia rosanovi''
Nabokov, 1912[Writer ]Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (russian: link=no, Владимир Владимирович Набоков ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Bor ...
paraphrased his father's description of the owlet moth ''Plusia rosanovi'' (as it appeared in Volume III of the four-volume ''Butterflies and Moths of the Russian Empire'', 1912) in his posthumous essa
"Father's Butterflies"
printed in ''The Atlantic'', April 2000: "How lovely it is, by the way, how one's eye is caressed by, the dark-cherry forewing, traversed by a mauve-pink stripe and adorned at its center by the golden emblem of its genus, in this instance a tapering, bowed half-moon -- and if it is hard to render the flowery velvet of the background, what is one to say of the 'emblem,' which, on the actual moth, resembles a dab of gilt redolent of turpentine, and must therefore be copied (and recopied!) in such a way that the painter's work transmits, besides all the rest, a resemblance to the work of a painter!"
* ''
Plusia venusta''
Walker, 1865
References
*
*
*
Plusiinae
Taxa named by Ferdinand Ochsenheimer
{{Plusiinae-stub