Ichneutica fenwicki
species of moth endemic to New Zealand

Ichneutica fenwicki is a moth of the family Noctuidae. This species is endemic to New Zealand and is found in the southern parts of the South Island and on Stewart Island. It is a distinctively coloured moth that is unlikely to be confused with closely related species. It is a spring flying moth being on the wing from September to November. The life history and host species of the larvae of I. fenwicki are unknown.
Taxonomy
This species was first described by Alfred Philpott in 1921 using a specimen collected by Charles Cuthbert Fenwick in Dunedin in September. Philpott originally named the species Melanchra fenwicki. The holotype specimen is held at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. In 1930 Philpott, thinking he was describing a new species, also named the species Melanchra dives. In 1988 J. S. Dugdale, in his catalogue of New Zealand lepidoptera, placed this species within the genus Graphania and synonymised Melanchra dives with G. fenwicki.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q104180430. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1921, 1930 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ichneutica fenwicki” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.