How do yucca moths find food?

They fly around and look with their eyes and if they smell prey they will go to them. They also go inside garbages and lay eggs that turn into larvae because they cannot get out. Oh and did you know that they love eating clothes too they feed on it.

How do yucca moths find food?
Like most moth pollinated flowers the yucca is most fragrant at night. Moths have odor receptors in their antennae. Their antennae are mobile to aid in stabile flight and in localizing the origin of a scent.


Yucca filamentosa, the most common species, was analyzed for floral scents. 21 scent compounds in two major classes were identified.


These compounds are volatile and easily detected in a scent plume by the moth and followed back to the plant. Moths can detect odor molecules when very rare then seek out the direction of greater fragrance density. This is chemotaxis.


http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/...





'Chemistry and geographic variation of floral scent in Yucca filamentosa'


http://www.amjbot.org/cgi/content/full/9...


http://research.yale.edu/peabody/jls/htm...


'Limiting cheaters in mutualism: evidence from hybridization between mutualist and cheater yucca moths.'


http://www.level1diet.com/research/id/96...





Yucca brevifolia has a musty odor often likened to a fungus.
Reply:Yucca moths have a unique relationship with the yucca plant. They feedon the nectaroof the flowers and pollinate the plant, and the caterpillars feed on the seeds. For more information, read on:


he relationships between plants and insects are often intricate and complex. One such relationship is that between the yucca plant and the yucca moth. Just as the honeybee and the flowers it pollinates need each other, so do the yucca and the yucca moth.


Female yucca moths have a few days to deposit approximately one hundred eggs. So they fly around, scattering their eggs onto various yucca flowers. A female typically injects about three to five eggs into one yucca flower's ovary. In the process, she benefits the flower by pollinating it.





Here's where this relationship gets more complicated though. When the moth's larvae hatch they feed on about twenty of the yucca flower's three hundred seeds. However, if too many larvae hatch inside one flower, the plant will abort the flower and the larvae will die. Therefore, it's to the advantage of the moths to be sure the flowers they deposit their eggs in do not become overloaded with eggs. Thus, the moths have developed communication through scent.





When a female moth lands onto a flower she uses her antennae to inspect the flower for the scents of previous female visitors. If one or more moths have already deposited eggs in that flower this visitor will either reduce the number of eggs she lays or move onto another flower. When she does decide to lay her eggs onto a particular flower she drags her abdomen about the surface of the flower in order to leave her own scent as a warning to future visitors.
Reply:with there hard noce they bore through boxes and bags of food at houses , and then lay larva inside of them because then can't get out.