#eggar moth

[colorsoutofearth]

Eggar moth (Trabala vishnou) female, Laos

Photo by Robert Thomas

[corbinmorrell]

Shaking the drawing rust off, with the Eggar moth life cycle for LettyDraws. I love how these guys cocoons look like acorns! And they're so fuzzy, my gosh.

[drhoz]

huge gum snout moth caterpillar (Entometa fervens)

must have been 10 cm long. Maybe 15 cm long. It was impressively huge.

[drhoz]

#171 - Entometa fervens

One of the prize finds of the visit to Uranquinty - I was strolling past a large gum tree, scanning it for anything interesting, and stopped dead with an exclamation of, if I recall correctly, "Holy M*****-F***ing F***!!!!"

What had I seen? This!

Doesn't look like much? Well, let's pan right slightly...

So what?, I hear you ask, thanks to the modern miracle of online spyware.

It's a Snake-mimicing Gum Snout Moth Caterpillar! Admittedly, in these two shots, she's still doing a very good job of pretending to be a twig.

Notice the two red prongs above her head, and the creases to either side. When threatened, this caterpillars rear up, tuck their head down, and suddenly transforms into a fork-tongued snake with great big white eyes and black slit pupils.

I nearly dropped the first one of these I found, over here in Perth, because I wasn't expecting the trick. Alas, this one apparently didn't feel threatened by me, so you're have to look at photos of it displaying, here