A moth comes onto my couch and starts crawling around lazily. I offer it a finger and it climbs onto it. When it tickles my finger a little I lightly touch one of its antennae, making sure not to make any of the fine, powdery scales on the moth's wings come off by touching those, and instead of flying away the moth just crawls a few centimetres. I had to touch its antennae again to get it up past my knuckle.
It was motionlessly clinging to my hand. When I tilted my hand upside down, it braced its legs to keep itself on me but otherwise didn't move a muscle.
Is it dying? Many animals lie somewhere comfortable and wait to die, I have scraped clearly dead moths off fly screen windows before after they'd fastened themselves to them with their six fuzzy legs and waited for the inevitable. On the other hand, when I went for a piss and made sure to keep my hand steady, the moth suddenly flew off my hand and onto a curtain above my head. It's still LDARing there. It was fine with me walking and touching it before.
Why is this? Do moths rest during the day (and this one is relaxing, not looking for somewhere to die) and it was too sleepy to fear me? Was it sponging off the heat generated by my body to keep itself comfortable and then flew off when I enterred the shade and cooled the surface of my hand? Is it attracted to the cloth of the curtain? I wonder if the moth is able to feel some very basic equivalent to comfort or contentment as it sits on a warm hand.
