To the untrained eye, the Florida scrub ecosystem isn’t much to look at. Scattered in patches around coastal and inland Florida, the scrub landscape is dominated by shrubs and short oaks, all growing out of sandy soil.
“Scrub” is truly an apt name for it.
But this habitat is home to a number of unique plant and animal species, including the threatened Florida scrub-jay, the only bird found only in Florida.
The list of specialized scrub animals grew longer this spring when I officially named – and found in the wild – a species of moth unique to the Florida scrub.
I’m an evolutionary biologist and entomologist, serving as curator of entomology at the University of Colorado Boulder Museum of Natural History. In March 2026 I, along with my collaborators, Scott Wehrly and Jeff Slotten, published an article in ZooKeys describing this new moth from the Florida scrub.
I colloquially refer to it as the “Florida sack-bearer,” but it’s formally known as Cicinnus albarenicolus, Latin for “white sand dweller.” The name “sack-bearer” indicates that it belongs to a small family of moths known as Mimallonidae whose caterpillars make sacklike cases that they haul around, kind of like the way a hermit crab carries around a shell. There are just over 300 sack-bearer species, with only six, including our new one, known from North America.
Ryan St Laurent
The discovery
The recent publication of our scientific paper was the first time the scientific community learned of the moth’s existence, but it is the culmination of more than a decade of work.
I have been studying sack-bearers throughout my professional career, which started as an undergraduate at Cornell University, where I worked in the Cornell University Insect Collection. It was in this collection that a small sample of sack-bearer moths collected in Florida, with a chunky body and pink-hued wings spanning about 1.25-1.5 inches (3-4 centimeters) – medium size for a moth – caught my eye.
I began to wonder whether perhaps this moth was a separate species of sack-bearer, because it looked quite different from the more beige-colored Melsheimer’s sack-bearer that is common all over the eastern United States, including Florida. But I did not yet have enough data to substantiate my theory.
Then as a graduate student at the University of Florida, I delved into learning more about sack-bearer evolution. Whenever I had a free moment, I spent time in the field looking for wild individuals of the still-unnamed Florida sack-bearer. But still, no luck.
Then I spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Even though I was primarily working on a completely different group of moths, I had not forgotten about the Florida moth. And there, in the Smithsonian collections, I found a single specimen of a Florida sack-bearer from 1960.
Fortunately, it was a recent enough specimen to yield a good DNA sample. This allowed me to get the final piece of information that I was looking for: a DNA sequence to confirm that this moth was distinct from its relatives.
The genetic results were unequivocal: The Florida species was clearly distinct, thus confirming my long-held suspicions that this was a new, undescribed species of moth. This was the final piece of information I needed to start writing the paper formally describing and naming the new moth.
Photo by Jeffrey Slotten
Encounter in the wild
As excited as I was to describe a new species, I feared that the moth might already be extinct, since no recent specimens existed and the Florida scrub habitat is highly degraded, down to about 10% of what ecologists estimate was present prior to European settlement.
But I contacted various moth collectors in Florida to see whether anyone had seen this moth recently, and to my surprise one of them had. The co-authors on the Zookeys paper, Jeff Slotten and Scott Wehrly, helped me discover a small set of specimens from the 2010s and 2020s that Scott had collected. This discovery, in late 2025, allowed me to add some new specimens to the paper and update the text reporting this newly discovered collection of more contemporary samples of Florida sack-bearers.
Knowing that all sightings of this moth occurred between March and May, I traveled to Florida in April. I was hoping to see it for myself and learn more about its active times, habitat requirements, diet, mating habits and other aspects of its biology – all still completely unknown. Since the recent specimens were all male, I set the goal to find a female, which would be the first one seen in over 60 years. Finding a female would also be an opportunity to collect eggs.
On April 18, 2026, I traveled to a new site that I had scoped out back in grad school, and sure enough, at 8:49 p.m., I found a female at my specialized moth light trap. This female was followed by two others, and I was able to collect eggs. Hopefully this summer these will yield a bunch of caterpillars so my colleagues and I can observe the moth’s full life cycle and learn more about this elusive insect.
What makes the Florida sack-bearer so special?
Without knowing more about it, it’s challenging to articulate what this moth’s larger role in the ecosystem might be. And that is precisely why this discovery is important.
One possibility that is already becoming clear is that this species may be an excellent indicator of Florida scrub health and how different forest management techniques affect the scrub ecosystem. My recent field work indicates that this particular moth may be thriving in areas experiencing more recent and frequent prescribed burns, but this hypothesis needs further study. My hope is that studying this moth will give a better sense of how to manage scrubs in order to protect this and other species with similar habitat requirements.
The evolution of the Florida sack-bearer also remains a puzzle. Just how did it get to Florida in the first place? White sand scrubs are thought to be older than yellow sand scrubs of Florida and are formed from ancient sand dunes. Perhaps the Florida sack-bearer is an ancient relic of a time when Florida was very different from today.
By studying this moth and its distribution in the state, we may better understand how sack-bearers arrived in North America from Central and South America millions of years ago.
Ryan St Laurent
What’s in a name?
In total, only 19 specimens of the Florida sack-bearer were known to me at the time of its formal description. Only three of those were collected after 1964, and those all came from locations near Ocala, Florida. The other 13 specimens are from just five white sand scrub habitats scattered across peninsular Florida. While the news that the moth persists in at least a couple of places is welcome, sites that supported this moth back in the 1960s may no longer have enough scrub habitat due to substantial habitat loss.
It’s possible that this moth has been discovered just in time to realize it’s at risk of going extinct. But my hope is that by naming this rare moth, our team has enabled conservationists and legislators to fight for its protection.
