Abstract. 1. Mobility is important for the understanding of how species survive infragmented landscapes and cope with increasing rates of habitat and climate change.However, mobility is a difficult trait to explore and is poorly known in most taxa.Species traits have been studied in relation to range shifts, extinction risks, andresponses to habitat area and isolation, and have also been suggested as good estimatorsof mobility. Here we explore the relation between mobility and species traits in noctuidmoths.2. We sampled noctuid moths by an automatic light-trap on an island far out in theBaltic Sea. We compared traits of the non-resident species on the island with traits ofa species pool of assumed potential migrants from the Swedish mainland.3. Mobility was significantly related to adult activity period, length of flightperiod, and the interaction between host-plant specificity and distribution area. Widelydistributed host-plant generalists were more mobile than host-plant specialists withmore restricted distribution, and species with an adult activity period in August toSeptember moved to the island to a higher extent than species with an adult activityperiod in May to July. Our results remained qualitatively robust in additional analyses,after controlling for phylogeny and including all species recorded on the island, exceptfor the trait ‘length of flight period’.4. Our results highlight the importance of the relation between mobility and speciestraits. Noctuid moths with certain traits move over longer distances than earlier known.This finding is important to include when predicting range dynamics in fragmentedand changing landscapes, and when conservation measures of species are devised.