Ah I’ve never seen this moth before so I had to go looking up photos of it, thank you @sporesmore
So doing a little research, these moths are from the family Pterophoridae which are the plume moths.
The many-plumed moth wings are a modified so that the fore and hind wing are made up of six spines and have these little bristles all over them.
Edit to this! In the above I said these moths belong to the family Pterophoridae. They are actually in the family Alucitidae. I got a little confused because it is somewhat debated with taxonomists but currently it is believed that
Alucitidaea is closely related.
would this be a result of convergent evolution for something akin to feathers?
I would say no it wouldn’t be convergent evolution. As feathers and the above (although somewhat similar in appearance) are not morphologically similar.
Wings in plume and many-plume moths functions and structures are very different and are very simple structures compared to the complexity that are feathers.
There’s not a lot of information on Alucitidae (many-plume moths) (this could because the split of Alucitidae from Pterophoridae is recent, as it was believed they were of the same family) but there is some information on wings in Pterophoridae (plume moths).
In Pterophoridae (and in
Alucitidae) the wings are shown to be cleft into multiple narrow plume-like structures (as shown below) and in the cause of Alucitidae: six plumes per wing (for a total of 24) as shown above.
These plumes are veins that have many thin flexible bristles or setae that protrude from them (the long hair-looking
bristles
as shown above).
Setae are composed of chitin, while bird feathers are in comparison made of keratin. There are also three main types of feathers in birds; down for insulation, filoplumes or sensory feathers and contour feathers (that provide feathers for flight + waterproofing) as shown below.
You can see that bird feathers are very very complex structures, that have many different types and functions compared to the setae that make up the wings of plume moths.
This makes sense because while feathers make birds excellent flyers, plume moths are….somewhat terrible flyers (if you call fluttering around really flying at all) because they don’t really have the need to fly like other moths with the typical membraned wings you’d expect.
