The community grew quickly once the surrounding woodlands fell victim to a natural disaster in 1889 in the form of a nun moth infestation.
In The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, the character Pappachi discovers a new species of lymantriid with "unusually dense dorsal tufts".
The discoverers of Rahonavis initially named it Rahona but changed the name after discovering that the name Rahona was already assigned to a genus of lymantriid moths.