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.
Florida scrub makes up 70% of Ocala National Forest.
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….
