| Palintropa hippica | |
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| Species: | P. hippica |
| Binomial name | |
| Palintropa hippica Meyrick, 1913 | |
Palintropa hippica is a moth in the family Gelechiidae. It was described by Meyrick in 1913. It is found in Sri Lanka. [1]
Moths comprise a group of insects related to butterflies, belonging to the order Lepidoptera. Most lepidopterans are moths, and there are thought to be approximately 160,000 species of moth, many of which have yet to be described. Most species of moth are nocturnal, but there are also crepuscular and diurnal species.
The Gelechiidae are a family of moths commonly referred to as twirler moths or gelechiid moths. They are the namesake family of the huge and little-studied superfamily Gelechioidea, and the family's taxonomy has been subject to considerable dispute. These are generally very small moths with narrow, fringed wings. The larvae of most species feed internally on various parts of their host plants, sometimes causing galls. Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga) is a host plant common to many species of the family, particularly of the genus Chionodes, which as a result is more diverse in North America than usual for Gelechioidea.
Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is an island country in South Asia, located in the Indian Ocean to the southwest of the Bay of Bengal and to the southeast of the Arabian Sea. The island is geographically separated from the Indian subcontinent by the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait. The legislative capital, Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, is a suburb of the commercial capital and largest city, Colombo.
The wingspan is 13–14 mm. The forewings are fuscous irrorated with whitish and with a dark brown patch irregularly irrorated with blackish extending along the costa from one-third to near the apex, and reaching more than half across the wing, limited beneath before the middle by a large tuft of scales on the fold. A silvery-grey-whitish line crosses the wing at five-sixths, on the lower half dilated into a spot preceded and followed by light brownish-ochreous spaces and margined anteriorly by a dark fuscous tuft of scales. There is a silvery-whitish angulated transverse line immediately before the apex. The hindwings are dark grey, thinly scaled and semi-transparent in the disc anteriorly. [2]
The wingspan 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 60.93 metres, and a wandering albatross caught in 1965 had a wingspan of 3.63 metres, the official record for a living bird. The term wingspan, more technically extent, is also used for other winged animals such as pterosaurs, bats, insects, etc., and other fixed-wing aircraft such as ornithopters. In humans, the term wingspan also refers to the arm span, which is distance between the length from one end of an individual's arms to the other when raised parallel to the ground at shoulder height at a 90º angle. Former professional basketball player Manute Bol stands at 7 ft 7 in (2.31 m) and owns one of the largest wingspans at 8 ft 6 in (2.59 m).
