Plusia is a genus of moths of the family Noctuidae. The genus was erected by Ferdinand Ochsenheimer in 1816.
Description Palpi upturned, where the second joint reaching vertex of head. Antennae of male ciliated. Thorax with a very large spreading tuft on the vertex. Abdomen with three large dorsal tufts on basal segments, and lateral and anal tufts more or less strongly developed in male. Forewings hooked at outer angle. Larva with two pairs of abdominal prolegs.
Species Plusia contexta Grote, 1873 Plusia festucae Linnaeus, 1758 - gold spot Plusia magnimacula D. Handfield & L. Handfield, 2006 Plusia manchurica Lempke, 1966 Plusia nichollae Hampson, 1913 Plusia putnami Grote, 1873 Plusia rosanovi Nabokov, 1912Writer Vladimir Nabokov paraphrased his father's description of the owlet moth Plusia rosanovi (as it appeared in Volume III of the four-volume Butterflies and Moths of the Russian Empire, 1912) in his posthumous essay "Father's Butterflies", printed in The Atlantic, April 2000: "How lovely it is, by the way, how one's eye is caressed by, the dark-cherry forewing, traversed by a mauve-pink stripe and adorned at its center by the golden emblem of its genus, in this instance a tapering, bowed half-moon -- and if it is hard to render the flowery velvet of the background, what is one to say of the 'emblem,' which, on the actual moth, resembles a dab of gilt redolent of turpentine, and must therefore be copied (and recopied!) in such a way that the painter's work transmits, besides all the rest, a resemblance to the work of a painter!" Plusia venusta Walker, 1865
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