I got out early this morning and visited one of my favorite caterpillar hunting grounds – Cuivre River State Park in Lincoln County, MO. The pecker gnats were bad around sunrise but they would get to unbearable by lunch time, along with some nice heat and humidity. It was a typical mid-summer outing – rather slow. However, I always seem to find enough to keep me interested.
Along with a couple of new species, I was pleased to find two specimens of the yellow-collared slug (Apoda y-inversum #4667). A member of my favorite Family – the Limacodidae, the adult moth of this species is known by the name of the inverted-Y slug moth. Both of these cats were found on different leaves of the same hickory sapling. I don’t find these guys every season, so this was a nice find indeed.
Slug moth caterpillars are standouts in the lepidopteran world in more ways than one. In these photos I hoped to showcase their peculiar way of shielding their heads by keeping it retracted in their thorax. Even during feeding, they keep their head covered by a fleshy extension of the first thoracic segment. Seeing their true heads extended, especially in this species is quite a rare sight. I guess the one who briefly did show its face for me today was getting a little curious about what I was doing to the leaf it was feeding on as I manipulated the leaf in the clamp to get the angles I was looking for.
A Thousand Acres of Silphiums 