Forget the moths that eat your clothes. Most are beautiful and deserve to be loved | Tim Blackburn

From the merveille du jour to the burnished brass, Britain's 2,500 species of moths are all special in their own way

• Tim Blackburn is professor of invasion biology at UCL and author of The Jewel Box: How Moths Illuminate Nature's Hidden Rules

Let me start with a confession: I love moths. If your instant reaction to that statement is a shudder and expression of dislike (or worse), be assured that you're not alone. It is the commonest response I get. But before you scroll on or turn the page, I hope you will give me a couple of minutes of your time to persuade you to change your mind. Moths are extremely important and beautiful creatures, and we should all love them.

Almost all of them, anyway. There's a couple of tiny species that nibble holes in your jumpers and chew your carpets, and I'm not going to try to make you love those. Feel free to hate them with a vengeance, particularly as autumn draws in and you open your jumper drawer to find unwanted evidence of their labours. But Britain has about 2,500 other species of moths, and it would be unfair to let the clothes moths colour your perceptions of the other 99.9%. And the others really are special, in all sorts of ways.