I’ll admit it, I will typically put members of the Geometridae right back on the plants that I found them on without taking any photos. The “inchworms” or “loopers” are typically very small and difficult to get a good photograph of. Additionally, species in this family tend to exhibit a great deal of variability in colors and patterns. To make matters even worse, members of this family tend to be polyphagous, or generalists when it comes to their host plants. These factors can make it quite difficult to accurately identify the specimens to species level when working only with photographs. However, this is a very important family when it comes to available biomass to birds and other predators in the spring and early summer.
I tend to be a big fan of common names given to moths, but I feel this one misses the mark. This season, I found the tulip-tree beauty (Epimecis hortaria – 6599) on sassafras, pawpaw and flowering dogwood. Why they chose this name for such a generalist species is beyond me. However, I guess it definitely is a beauty.
This species is known to have a good deal of variability in the color and patterns they exhibit, but the half dozen or so I found all looked like the one pictured in this post. Maybe this variability is region specific, or I just had bad luck? It is a relatively easy species of inchworm to identify due to its unusual body proportion, making it look as though it might brag about how much it can bench 😉
This poor guy has fallen prey to an external parasitoid wasp (Euplectrus sp.) larvae and, unfortunately, will not make it to its adult stage.
A Thousand Acres of Silphiums 