Caterpillar ID please
Heee! I found a caterpillar on our car that I have not seen before. I believe it may have crawled onto or dropped from a tree while we were in town this morning, because it was on the car as soon as we got home. It was between the space of the car tag and the bumper, and I only noticed it because I was taking groceries out of the back.
It's not strange, just odd from other caterpillars we normally find around the house.
Since I do not have a camera except for a camera phone, I drew a picture of it. EEEK!
It is not the best in the world, but here are the pictures.
One is colored, and one is just the lines.
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y82/Desirai/cater_2.jpg
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y82/Desirai/cater_1.jpg
It is 1.7 inches long. One antenna is 7 mm, while the other is 1.1 cm. It doesn't look broken because it has the little 'bulb' on the end.
In each segment of its body, it has 6 tiny little spines about 1 mm long. It's black with horizontal orange lines. On the sides, the lines zigzag like in the pic, but the other lines are straight. It is very fat, and also seems to be sickly.
It doesn't crawl much, it just sits. It just sits on me, I pet it, poke it, and I inspected it when I found it, looking for ants or something. It doesn't seem to have any noticeable bite wounds or anything. I stuck it in a jar with leaves from the plants in our yard, hoping it'd eat something. Is it perhaps ready to make a chrysalis? or cocoon? I'm not sure the difference between a moth caterpillar and a butterfly caterpillar, eep. ^^; I'd be glad if I could release it on a plant outside.
Oh, and I named it Medusa because of the strange antenna lengths, hehehehe.
Contributed by Desirai on 29 August, 2007 - 4:41pm Last updated 29 August, 2007 - 9:57pm |