#2599 - Protosynaema eratopis
A VERY rarely recorded moth - the tiny handful of other sightings and collections are all from Arthur's Pass. It happened to be hiding behind a bluebell as I was trying to photograph a tiny Mirid bug.
First described by Edward Meyrick in 1885. One of the few images of the moth online is this illustration from George Hudson's The Butterflies and Moths of New Zealand (1927).
The eyespots and diagonal stripes strongly suggest to me that this is a jumping spider mimic - a tactic used by a startling number of unrelated moths, flies and caddisflies.
Petrophila sp. Moth (Crambidae) - photo by Nicky Bay
Here's a selection of more just from the Nearctic. And a paper where neural networks trained on jumping spiders mistook the moths for same.
It's a pretty effective way to discourage attacks from real jumping spiders, given how frequently they'll cannibalise each other. And if the spider attacks anyway, the moth can fly off in an unexpected direction.
Arthur's Pass, Aotearoa New Zealand