This is a follow-up to the Big Green Caterpillar post from last August. My wife had determined that this caterpillar was probably Antheraea Polyphemus.
We found three cocoons from these guys around our yard last fall. One was attached to a board leaning against the house and two were wrapped up in leaves under trees. This spring, it didn’t look like one of the cocoons on the ground had made it. We put the other inside one of our daughter’s “bug catchers” so we could keep an eye on it, and today it emerged!
It’s so miraculous, this metamorphosis. He wasn’t ready to fly at first, so we got a good look at him and several good pictures. Such a crazy life-cycle: starting as a crawling thing and then spending the winter in a cocoon to emerge as a flying creature in the spring. They don’t eat in their moth form and live less than a week. The male will fly for miles to find females to mate with.
You can see more detail in the larger images linked from here. The large, bushy antennae say that this one is a male. It may be hard to tell from the photos, but the spots are translucent.
It was pretty cool to see both sides of the transformation and fun and exciting to share this with our daughter. Before long he took off and fluttered away. Makes me think about all of the ways that life plays out around us. If not for the happenstance of seeing that big green caterpillar last fall, we would have been oblivious to this drama playing out.
It just amazes me that this works at all. It seems so complicated. But it’s wonderful.
Shot with: 6 mega-pixel Canon SD600
Shared with: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
7 Comments
Watching this process as a child is one of the main reasons I ended up a biologist. I’m no less fascinated and awed by it now than I was at six.
30 May 2009 at 11:53 pm
I ran across the moth form a few years ago, and just recently my boyfriend stumbled upon the caterpillar. I suspected they were the same, and a little googling brought me to this post. Now I know what it is. Thanks for posting! GREAT pictures.
19 November 2009 at 12:12 am
Hi, Linh. You’re welcome, and thank you for visiting and commenting!
19 November 2009 at 4:31 am
I found the same kind of caterpillar, and watched it spin the cocoon last winter. Just last night it hatched. I agree it was very cool to see what would happen to it.
24 May 2010 at 12:41 pm
OMG at this very moment one of these things is chilling in the back of my boss’s gallery! It’s huge! It’s as big as my hand! Everyone is saying ” let it chill, don’t touch” so I took some pictures with my hand near it instead. Holy crap, I closed the door to the back that thing is scaring me – even if he won’t hurt me, he’s the biggest bug I have ever seen in person!
(My apologies to any biologist who will tell me “Moths aren’t bugs” I don’t know if they are or not)
7 June 2010 at 1:14 pm
I found one of these big green caterpillars and don’t know where to put it. Any help anyone?
15 August 2010 at 4:15 pm
What do I feed it?
15 August 2010 at 4:16 pm