Enormous Australian Wood Moth With 25cm Wings is Very Heavy, It Struggles to Fly

The heaviest species of moth in the world has been found at a southeast Queensland school in Australia.

Workers at the Mount Cotton State School discovered the giant moth at the construction site of new classrooms.

Australian Giant Wood Moth Unsurprising Find for School Officials, Students

School officials and students said they were not surprised with the find as Mount Cotton State School is located near a rainforest surrounded by a wide range of animals.

Pictures show the moth perched at the end of a saw while a worker held on to it from a distance. The gray-colored, fuzzy creature is definitely enormous, seemingly measuring nearly a third's length of the saw.

Known as Endoxyla cinereus, the giant wood moth is part of the Cassidae family and lives only for a few days as an adult.

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Australian Giant Wood Moth Considered the Heaviest in the World

The moth is considered the heaviest in the world, with the female weighing up to 30 grams, with a wingspan of 25 centimeters. Even with such a wingspan, the moth flies poorly, and when they appear, females crawl to an elevated area and wait for males to find them.

Males are half the female's size, and since the females only survive for a few days as an adult, and when they emerge, they find each other and mate. After the females lay eggs, they die.

As caterpillars, they dig deep into gum trees and feed on the growing tissue of the tree's bark, said insect expert Ted Edwards, Honorary Fellow of the Australian National Insect Collection, said in an ABC Radio Australia report.

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Australian Giant Wood Moths are Rarely Seen

He added that the creatures stay in that place for three years, and before they transform into a pupa, they would cut their way out of the bark and build their defenses against ants and other insects. Yet Edwards says, when they emerge, they are rarely seen.

Moths, he said, have a total life span of around three to four years, as adult females are non-feeding and depend on fats stored as larvae as they were feeding inside the tree trunk.

Around 60 species of wood moths in Australia, the Queensland Museum revealed, but not all species are as enormous as the giant wood moth, and not all of its feeds on the eucalypts, The Guardian reported. These giant moths are found between the Australian states of North Queensland and southern New South Wales. They are not only identified by their large sizes but by the dark circular pattern circling their throats.

While finding this giant wood moth is extremely rare, they normally emerge at the end of the Australian summer season, a Newsweek article said.

Workers took a photo of the moth before releasing it to the rainforest.