Two More Caterpillars
I found three more interesting caterpillars right after I finished my last post.
One is the strangest caterpillar I've ever seen. It's called a Monkey Slug Caterpillar (Phobetron pithecium). The adult is called a Hag Moth. Wagner says that the female adult moths resemble a bee, and the male adults resemble a wasp. He also speculates that the caterpillar mimics the look of a tarantula. So this one moth mimics three different species!
This is the caterpillar.
It's about 15mm long, and it's eating oak leaves. The left side is the head (the only way I can tell is to watch the way it moves). Here's a photo of the underside, while it's eating. (The head is at the top - it's nibbling on the top part of the leaf, right at the big vein.)
Its body is transparent, and when I look between the hairy projections on the top, I can see down into the inside of its body. What an amazing creature!
The other two caterpillars are Eastern Tiger Swallowtails (Papilio glaucus), and they're eating lilac. I've never found Tiger Swallowtail caterpillars before, and I never knew they ate lilac leaves. (James Scott's book does list it as a food plant.) These two were on some of the lilac branches that I brought in to feed my cecropias. They're an early instar - they still look like bird droppings.
I also found three small fuzzy bumps on oak leaves, that I think are wasp galls. (I decided that wasps and caterpillars don't mix well, so I didn't keep them to see the wasps hatch.) I think they must be three different species.
(All of these creatures are very small - I'm learning to take photos through my dissecting microscope.)
Marcie - from the farm