| Stigmella stigmaciella | |
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| Species: | S. stigmaciella |
| Binomial name | |
| Stigmella stigmaciella Wilkinson & Scoble, 1979 | |
Stigmella stigmaciella is a moth of the Nepticulidae family. It is found in British Columbia, Canada.
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.
Nepticulidae is a family of very small moths with a worldwide distribution. They are characterised by eyecaps over the eyes. These pigmy moths or midget moths, as they are commonly known, include the smallest of all living moths, with a wingspan that can be as little as 3 mm in the case of the European pigmy sorrel moth, but more usually 3.5–10 mm. The wings of adult moths are narrow and lanceolate, sometimes with metallic markings, and with the venation very simplified compared to most other moths.
British Columbia is the westernmost province of Canada, located between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. With an estimated population of 5.034 million as of 2019, it is Canada's third-most populous province.
The larvae feed on Crataegus species. They mine the leaves of their host plant.
Crataegus, commonly called hawthorn, quickthorn, thornapple, May-tree, whitethorn, or hawberry, is a genus of several hundred species of shrubs and trees in the family Rosaceae, native to temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere in Europe, Asia and North America. The name "hawthorn" was originally applied to the species native to northern Europe, especially the common hawthorn C. monogyna, and the unmodified name is often so used in Britain and Ireland. The name is now also applied to the entire genus and to the related Asian genus Rhaphiolepis.
A leaf miner is any one of a large number of species of insects in which the larval stage lives in and eats the leaf tissue of plants. The vast majority of leaf-mining insects are moths (Lepidoptera), sawflies and flies (Diptera), though some beetles also exhibit this behavior.
