Alabama argillacea

The adult moth has light brown to orange wings. It wingspan varies from 25 to 35 mm. The larvae are up to 40 mm long, green or brownish with black and white stripes. They have a characteristic pattern of black dots on each segment.

Alabama argillacea is a specialist feeder on Gossypieae, which includes cotton and its close relatives. Like other anomine erebids, its distribution is primarily tropical and only migrates north in the summer and fall under favorable conditions. Its eggs are sensitive and cannot tolerate any amount of frost in the winter, restricting the adults to historically spend the winter in Florida and Texas. However, its eggs may have never overwintered at all in the United States. Any adults which found themselves up north in the fall would have died by the first frost. Females lay an average of 400 eggs, which is unusually high for a noctuoid. The entirety of the damage done to cotton is done by the larvae. Young instars feed primarily the underside of the leaves, skeletonizing them as they feed. Older instars move vertically and feed on the younger, fresher foliage near the bolls and sometimes on the bolls themselves. Depending on latitude, two to eight generations could have occurred in the United States each year. This made them an especially dangerous pest, as they fed year-round in some locations. In especially bad years, the larvae destroyed over a third of cotton crops. This resulted in the United States losing almost $30 million a year in lost profits (over $700 million in today's terms). …