Alucita

Alucita is the largest genus of many-plumed moths (family Alucitidae); it is also the type genus of its family and the disputed superfamily Alucitoidea. This genus occurs almost worldwide and contains about 180 species as of 2011^[update]; new species are still being described and discovered regularly.^{[citation needed]} Formerly, many similar moths of superfamilies Alucitoidea, Copromorphoidea and Pterophoroidea were also placed in Alucita.^{[citation needed]}

Alucita
Twenty-plume moth (A. hexadactyla) imago
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Arthropoda
Class:	Insecta
Order:	Lepidoptera
Family:	Alucitidae
Genus:	Alucita Linnaeus, 1758
Type species
Alucita hexadactyla Linnaeus, 1758
Synonyms [1]
Aleucita (lapsus) Allucita (lapsus) Alucitina Heydenreich, 1851[Note 1] Euchiradia Hübner, 1826 Orneodes Latreille, 1796 Orneodus (lapsus) Rhipidophora Hübner, 1822

The genus Alucita was established by Carl Linnaeus in the 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae as a subgenus of Phalaena, Linné's "wastebin genus" for moths^{[citation needed]}. Johan Christian Fabricius in 1775 seems to have been the first author to consider Alucita a genus in its own right, and it remains so until today.^{[citation needed]} However, some subsequent authors^[who?] believed Linnaeus' name to be invalid, and established alternative names for this genus, but, while the oldest of these, Pierre André Latreille's Orneodes, was used instead of Alucita for a long time, all these subsequent names are today recognized as junior synonyms.^[1]