Halloween Gross-Out: Caterpillar Photos

Australia's answer to the Eastern States' "Hickory Horned Devil" is the "Skull Caterpillar." Liz Klimas shares magnified close-ups of a caterpillar that is, in real life, only four or five inches long. (That's still twice the size of what we usually call a large caterpillar...)

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/if-you-look-at-one-wild-picture-of-an-amazing-caterpillar-today-it-should-be-this-one/

The parents of this creature, Pink Underwing Moths (Phyllodes imperialis), are endangered; they're thought to require darkness in the antipodean rain forest to breed properly. Australians apparently enjoy these moths and their caterpillars enough that the animals have their own web page at the Australian government site:

http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/sprat/public/publicspecies.pl?taxon_id=67453

More, and perhaps more Halloween-creepy, photos from the Daily Mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2224727/The-incredible-skull-caterpiller-fighting-life-Australian-rainforest.html

The U.S. counterpart (not endangered, but mercifully seldom seen, because it lives in the tops of tall trees) is a large, showy moth. (I find it ugly; e-friend Ronia Regal finds it beautiful, and derived her screen name from its scientific name, Citheronia regalis.) Here's the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citheronia_regalis

Halloween gross-out-quality photos here:

http://www.thefeaturedcreature.com/2011/11/meet-hickory-horned-devil.html#axzz2ApE3Xs6K

Do they bite or sting? Paul Villard claimed that they were "very severely urticating." Most sources say they're safe to touch. Sometimes individuals' reactions to contact with insects involve rare allergies, as with the reports of people claiming to be allergic to ladybugs. I've never handled a Hickory Horned Devil, but I once tried to move a wounded one out of the road, using a stick, and I can say that when a four-inch-long caterpillar is really trying to pull itself up by its jaws, it can really chomp. (People have reported five-inch and six-inch-long specimens...on caterpillars this size, individual variations show, but university web pages I checked say they're usually under five inches.)