Moths as Pests in Australia

Abstract

This short chapter introduces the following nine chapters, each of which deals, at the species level, with moths that are pests in Australia. Here we place these in the context of the entire fauna. Surprisingly, there is currently no comprehensive list of pest species of moths and whether they are native or introduced. Our scouring of the literature, databases and websites suggests ca 290, of which about 80 are invasive from elsewhere. Some 67% of the accidentally introduced non-native species are pests, compared with 1.7% of the native fauna, which probably reflects the availability of introduced, widely cultivated crop hosts. The moths identified as pests from our searches represent 33 families, but most come from just ten families. What is apparent for most of these families - Erebidae, Noctuidae, Crambida, Pyralidae, Tineidae, Hepialidae and Limacodidae - is that pest species are proportionately higher than might be expected from the families' diversity in the moth fauna as a whole. We suspect this reflects resource use in these species and what we humans consider to be of value.