Tiny moths everywhere

Categories: uncategorized

Tags: naturalhistory, food

Date: 10 October 2006 09:10:10

Moths in the porridge oats. Moths in the pasta. Huge piles (well, huge in a meiofaunal scale - there must be whole tenths of a gram if you add them together) of their eggs or their excretions or whatever the little brownish things are. A bit of both I suppose. If my microscope wasn't in a box completely buried under Abi's stuff, and if it wasn't nearly 1am, I'd try to i.d. them and draw little pictures.

Moths and eggs in a packet of Japanese crackers that has never been opened. Moths in a packet of split peas, ditto. So no home-made pea-soup this month. And its not within years of its sell-by date. How do they get in? Do they have sharp ovipositors? Do they bite their way in? Or is it just that the packets aren't particularly airtight?

Oh well. I've chucked out the obvioulsy contaminated stuff and I guess we ought to eat the rest PDQ & wipe down the cupboard properly.

I had this Secret Plot to identify everything I found in my house or garden. I'v got big noteboosk of the stuff. So I suppose I ought to suss out these moths if I can.

And the critical path to that goes straight through Abi having to tidy her stuff...