Spilosoma virginica is sometimes called the Virginia Tiger Moth. Since it is found in most of North America, identifying it with Virginia is not a very good description. Some prefer to call it the Yellow Bear, describing the shaggy appearance of the caterpillar.
Photo from Wikipedia. The caterpillar I met was more of a sepia color than that, but their color varies. They can be pure white, light brown, or red-orange. Their distinguishing feature is that, unlike other Tiger Moth larvae, Yellow Bears are monochromatic; the skin, hair, head, and feet are all similar in color with only a little shading. They don't have tufts, stripes, or bands of contrasting colored hairs, nor do they have contrasting colored heads or feet. Hair and skin colors aren't always perfect matches but generally light hair goes with light skin, darker hair with darker skin. Sometimes bright orange hair goes with dark brown skin. Beyond that, multicolored effects identify other kinds of Arctiids.
They are not venomous. Short stiff hairs will irritate the skin if they get down the back of the neck on a hot day. However, Yellow Bears are not among the species that seem attracted to humans as means of transportation, as Spongeys and Eastern Tent Caterpillars often, and some silk moth caterpillars occasionally, seem to be. Usually they mind their own business, nibbling on grass and weeds, and leave us alone.
These insects are more common in the Eastern States but they are found as far west as Vashon island, in Canada, in Texas, and in Mexico. For some reason they seem to be least common in California, but they're found there too. They can be found at any time of year when temperatures are above freezing, and have two to four generations in a year, but people most often see the late summer generation, always the most numerous. Late summer Yellow Bears are active when leaves start to fall and may hibernate through the winter, rousing and eating on thaw days, in places that have winter. In very warm climates they may pupate, fly, and produce an extra generation in winter.
They can eat just about anything and rarely eat enough of anything to harm the plant. Mostly they eat grass and other low-growing plants found in lawns and pastures among the grass, like clover as shown. They have been known to skeletonize a few leaves of an ornamental plant, and occasionally nibble on a vegetable in the garden, but generally they are harmless, cute little animals. They tend to move faster than Woolly Bears.
How harmless? The North Carolina Parks web page for this species,
https://auth1.dpr.ncparks.gov/moths/view.php?MONA_number=8137 , lists 26 plants other than grass on which people have found Yellow Bears munching. Three (basil, eggplant, and rhubarb) are things likely to be planted by humans as food. Three more (dock, plantain, and spicebush) are self-starter species on which some humans occasionally snack. The female moth usually lays about twenty eggs on the underside of one big leaf, and the hatchlings usually stay together on that leaf until they've nibbled it down to lace. Then they crawl away in different directions to explore the wonderful world of flavors. They seldom eat enough of any plant to affect its reproductive cycle. They take a leaf here and a leaf there, mostly from things like milkweed and ironweed that humans can't eat. In theory a Vicious Pesticide Cycle
could make them pests; in reality they hardly even become a nuisance.
I was trimming the hedge around a field that had been badly damaged by attempts to "control weeds" with chemicals. Down near the road, hogging the sunshine in the driest places, they had jimsonweed, which has mostly smooth but vaguely malevolent-looking leaves and thorny fruit--the "thorn apple" that looks like a big burr and eventually splits open to release black seeds. Up in the grass they had horse nettles, which look like jimsonweed but with sharp prickles all over the leaves, and fruit that look like tiny hard tomatoes. Both are seriously toxic to humans and domestic animals, though most mammals instinctively avoid eating them so you may find them in pastures where horses and cows have eaten around them for years, and both thrive on herbicide spraying--it clears away the nicer plants and makes room for these nasties to grow. People want to get rid of these weeds, it's a good idea not to handle them, so they've sprayed them with every kind of poison they could get, and both of these members of the nightshade family slurped it up and asked for more. I want to emphasize this point. Corporations tell you you can spray poisons that "only kill weeds," by which they mean lovable wild plants like daisies, dandelions, clover, dock, or chickweed, all of which can actually be used for food...and what that does is cultivate jimsonweed and horse nettles.
Some of the gardening sites mention that people have tried using horse nettles like stinging nettles, as medicinal herbs (stinging nettles' irritant properties can promote healing from some conditions). Does not work. Horse nettles irritate, all right, but they don't stop at irritating surface tissues in that benign and eventually soothing way. They can be fatal to any animal or person that eats them, and the plant sap, even apart from the prickles, can raise a rash on human skin.
So what can you do? If you listen to the corporations, upon identifying these horrid weeds on your property, you will immediately sell out to either an industrial farm conglomerate or a Chinese investor. Why risk your own hands to that nasty rash? Let Chinese people do the farming. Chinese people are foreign so they deserve to do all the...Consider the history of Chinese and Manchurian relations prior to the twentieth century. Chinese people have an average IQ score higher than any European nation's, and they used that "Just let us do all the work" line on the Manchurians who supposedly ruled their country, with great success. While wearing their hair in long braids to show their inferior status they quietly continued to control their own country's business. They have stopped working toward the goal of reducing population, recently. They have made progress toward the goal of taking over North America. I'm not sure how bad that might be, whether people who are foolish enough to sell land deserve to own land, whether Chinese people who get into a country free from the Chinese Communist Party become agents for or determined opponents of that Party. I've known Chinese-American people who were good neighbors but I think you, Gentle Readers, do deserve to own land.
The way to get rid of the evil, toxic weeds in the nightshade family is to persist. (There are others; the other nasty member of this family that is common in Virginia is bindweed, the most aggressive and one of the less ornamental kinds of convolvulus or "morning glory.") Wearing protective gear (jeans, sweatshirt, boots, leather gloves, and since these weeds like places that get lots of sunshine you'll probably want to add a hat), armed with a hoe and a trowel, pick every little sprout and seedling out of the field as they appear. A year or two of vigilance will starve the roots to death and stop the weeds trying to come back. If they do come back, as it might be because some birds can digest the fruit and drop seeds as they fly overhead, repeat the treatment as needed.
If a field is badly infested, horse-nettles are one of the species people have successfully killed by "solarizing" the infested area. They cut everything green as close to the ground as possible, then cover the infested area with a few layers of heavy plastic for an instant greenhouse effect. This gets rid of plants that like lots of sunshine but it means a whole year of looking at ugly plastic, after which more desirable plants will be dead too. Weeding out the weeds is probably a better plan.
Anyway, in addition to these nasties I was slicing through tangled mats of blackberries--wasted blackberries, the kind that have grown aggressively and formed tangled mats in response to "herbicide" damage, failed to produce fruit, and become hosts to fungus infections--and Lonicera japonica, the less desirable non-native honeysuckle, and Dioscorea polystachys or polystachya, the cinnamon vine or "Chinese Yam" that some Japanese people insist is delicious and nutritious but Americans won't eat...
Right. Now somebody Out There wants to try it. Here is what that person needs to know. Japanese people do not try to eat the fragrant leaves and cute little dollhouse-potato-like fruits of this annoying vine. They dig and eat the root, which looks like a giant sweetpotato. It does not taste like and can't be used like a sweetpotato or a yam. The Japanese peel their "Chinese yams" thickly, because their outside rind is nasty and toxic too. Then they slice them as thinly as possible. Then they soak the slices overnight in vinegar. This dissolves enough of the little crystals of acid that make the plant toxic that people who eat the slices, in moderation, show no immediate damage from eating it. The slices are still indigestible, though, until they've been stir-fried. They will still add a "pickle" flavor to the stir-fry, but some people like that. They contain plant protein, fibre, Vitamin C, Vitamin B6, and small amounts of other nutrients, and even some allantoin, a helpful biochemical found in garlic. So I suppose they qualify as survival food for people who like pickles. I do not like pickles. People who do are welcome to all of my "Chinese yams." (They grow well in the orchard. I usually spend a fair bit of time picking them out as they appear, but could be paid to let a few roots ripen for a person who wanted them, if I knew of such a person. I don't.)
And there were some pretty little asters some former resident had probably cultivated, long ago. And some nice dock, which I don't like to chop up even though its growing season was over anyway. And some nasty pokeweed, which I do like to chop down. And some goldenrod, which is pretty, and some bees were enjoying it, but you don't want goldenrod around the base of a black locust tree, which was what these people had in the middle of the tangle that included the goldenrod. And some leafless, flowerless rose bushes. (If you cut roses right down to the ground in autumn, most kinds will grow back and may bloom better next spring, so at least I didn't feel bad about chopping down the roses.) And assorted grasses including sage grass and sedge grass and fescue and even some anemic-looking ladies-thumb, which is one kind of grass humans can eat and which I recommend, though it will not produce the Astroturf look foolish people want in their wretched "lawns."
Moth and butterfly populations are in a decline; I was glad to see a half-dozen little Bears That Grow Up to Be Tigers foraging in the grass. Moths in the Arctiid family are often called Tigers because they have black and orange markings, and their caterpillars are called Bears because they have thick heavy coats. Woolly Bears, placid little things, didn't seem to mind being picked up and moved out of the way. Brown Bears curled up in my leather glove, saying "If you're going to eat me you'll get a mouthful of nasty hair," not seeming terribly concerned about the possibility.
And then there was a little Yellow Bear who discovered my shoe. I hadn't anticipated a need to wear boots and was wearing Skechers, made of some sort of textured plastic I don't recommend. Ah, but they were covered in cut grass and grass sap. I stepped away from a pile of cut grass and saw this caterpillar, clinging to my shoe, positively guzzling grass sap.
Here he (it was small for a Bear, hardly an inch and a half long, and females grow bigger than males; I suppose it might have been a young female but I'm going with "he") had been chewing and chewing and chewing at poor-quality, sprayed grass, trying to extract enough of whatever nourishes Yellow Bears to get him through the winter, and suddenly he plopped down on a surface covered in grass sap! The good stuff! All he had to do was slurp it up! His little head quivered as he slurped as fast as he could go.
I laughed out loud. I walked around, showing everyone how eager the little guy was to get more rewards for less labor. That may be a human failing, but it's not only human. I let the caterpillar clean the top of my shoe as best he could. Then I moved him out of the way before I resumed chopping and slashing and sawing, generally creating an environment where persons hardly an inch and a half long were likely to become a nasty mess in a nice new power saw.
He didn't like that. Here he was, trying to lick every drop of lovely grass sap off every millimetre of my shoe, and up came a strange thing that didn't taste like grass sap and plopped down in front of him. He had no interest in exploring something that probably tasted like horse-nettles when there was so much delicious grass sap to be licked. So then up came another strange thing that probably tasted like gasoline and prodded him from behind! He buck-jumped up into the air and landed on the strange thing that probably tasted like horse-nettles. He started to get himself into position for a mighty leap back down to the stuff that was covered in grass sap, and the strange thing that probably tasted like gasoline came down around him, and he thrashed about and--no doubt feeling that he'd impressed Fate with his tremendous efforts--suddenly found himself leaping down into some grass and weeds, very similar to where he'd been before he discovered the Plains of Pure Grass Sap.
He resumed munching. What else is a caterpillar to do? But he seemed to smell grass sap in the air, to hear or feel the vibrations of the Pure Grass Sap Experience resuming at a distance. Energized by the grass sap he'd been able to slurp up and the hope of more, he moved at a caterpillar's top speed back to what a caterpillar could not possibly have recognized as a special kind of power saw designed just for cutting through tangled mats of blackberry brambles. And grass. Oh, grass. Oh, pure grass sap. Elysian Fields of grass sap...
I was glad I saw the little fellow coming. I said, "You again!" He was making his way along a plant stem. I picked up the plant stem and moved it across the road.
This time, no doubt, he was puzzled by his strange experiences. But caterpillars are dumb animals in more than one sense of the word. They have ways to communicate what they consider the most important parts of their experiences to one another. They can smell who's found the juiciest leaves; some caterpillars will follow each other to food. They know who's male and who's female and who's attractive; some caterpillars try to pupate close to a future mate. But they have no way to tell one another, "There was a strange sound that shook all the grass stems around me, and then suddenly I found myself wallowing in pure grass sap, more grass sap than I could lick up, no matter how I tried! Heavenly! And then something took me away and put me back into the ordinary world where you find me now." Even trying to think through such a thing for themselves probably blows what they have in the way of minds. Probably they cope in the only way caterpillars can. Probably they forget the whole thing.
I saw no more of the Yellow Bear. I soon came to a section of hedge of less interest to him, and didn't meet any of his relatives, either.
Spilosoma virginica, the little Yellow Bear,
Crawled through an old cow pasture and never wondered where
The cattle had gone, long ago, leaving grass and weeds
Ideally suited to a Yellow Bear's nutrition needs.
Spilosoma virginica in coat of faded yellow
Scuttled where birds could not see the hairy little fellow,
Gnawed upon a blade of grass, then gnawed upon a leaf,
And had no brain to tell him that he might be thought a thief.
Spilosoma virginica's jaws had a good workout,
Chewing leaves and grasses up to get their juices out.
Then, resting from his efforts, heard an unfamiliar sound
And found himself in place where grass sap covered all the ground..
Spilosoma virginica began at once to lick
And gobble up the grass sap where it was both fresh and thick.
"How did I earn such blessings? Oh, but certainly I did!
I ate green stuff by day and night, as my Creator bid."
Spilosoma virginica no longer had to chew
To get the sap out of the grass! His mouthparts fairly flew.
Extracting more reward without exerting extra labor
Pleased him as much as it would please his cow or human neighbor.
Spilosoma virginica slurped, rolling in delight,
Till he was taken from the grass sap. Oh unhappy plight!
He squirmed, he lashed, he thrashed, and what he got for all his pain
Was back among the cellulose he had to chew again.
Spilosoma virginica went back to grass to munch,
Not really an unpleasant way to finish up his lunch.
He roamed from grass to dock leaves under bright October sky,
He eats and grows until time comes to rest, and then to fly.
