Calico Caterpillar and Blog Promotion Tip

While growth has not been this web site's goal, a rule that's worked for me throughout my online writing career has been "To increase traffic numbers, add a creepy-crawly thing." 

Or, in terms you would use, post something from your special niche of fun facts that everyone else in cyberspace doesn't know. Whatever that is. For me it happened to be insects. Gross-out caterpillar posts appeal to guys as much as pretty butterfly posts appeal to other old ladies.  

Early September is a good time to find caterpillars since it's when several species mature, wander about, pupate and turn into--mostly moths. 

Walking up the road to the Cat Sanctuary, I saw a really jazzy-looking caterpillar--long and lean (about two inches long, with lateral "racing stripes" adding to the visual illusion of length), black, with stripes of bright color. There was a dark red-brown pencil stripe down where its spine would be if it had a spine, narrow gas-flame-blue stripes on either side, wide blotchy lime-yellow-green stripes along the section of the sides through which caterpillars breathe, and a brighter red pencil stripe above the legs. 

Photo By Benny Mazur - originally posted to Flickr as Brown Hooded Owlet caterpillar, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7089407,

"What's that?" I thought, and hurried home to look it up. Several web sites agree that this great gaudy caterpillar is the larva of a rather small, dull moth, of no particular economic value, about which little is known. There are several moths in the genus Cucullia. None of them is very big or showy. Most of them look pretty much alike. The one that's most often found in Virginia, and that looks like this when young, is C. convexipennis, the Convex-Winged Cucullia, or Brown-Hooded Owlet. The caterpillar is sometimes called the Calico Caterpillar or Calico Paint Caterpillar. It eats wildflowers in the genera Aster, Solidago, and others, but not enough of any one species to affect species populations.. 

These moths are so uninteresting to most people that Google doesn't even have free pictures of them, though a detailed description at http://www.nearctica.com/moths/noctuid/cucullia/cucullia_convexipennis.htm shows how differently serious nature nerds feel about them. To the writer, who obviously takes the time to find ways to get these drab little moths to spread out their wings, they're "easily identified" and there's nothing else like them in their range (North Carolina to eastern Canada). 

The Calico Caterpillar is completely harmless, though if you Google "caterpillar with black and yellow stripes" you'll probably find information about gray-green caterpillars with black and yellow stripes, which are the other species (besides Forest Tent Caterpillars) nicknamed "armyworms," and can be harmful to vegetable gardens. (And, in nature, of course, those colors are a warning message that you don't want to eat the caterpillar. Blue, red, and yellow each suggest a different toxic chemical.)

But this little animal has already eaten the leaves of some flowers that may already have bloomed. All it has left to do is find a place to hide, spin a cocoon, and turn into a moth that will fly, if all goes well, for a few weeks next spring. It's another species that will benefit from protecting the habitat of Monarchs and other butterflies.