Thursday 31 January 2013

Port Eynon caterpillar

The caterpillar we collected on 1st Jan has grown substantially and is 26mm long after moulting a few times. It's clear now that it is a Square-spot Rustic, so our tentative Mythimna id was clearly wrong and a reminder that attempts at identifying young larvae are likely to have a high degree error.

2 comments:

  1. Or could it be Six-striped Rustic? Not sure it's possible to reliably tell the two apart as larvae.

    Nice photo!

    Cheers
    George

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks George, I'd overlooked that, though the probability of it being Square-spot Rustic is very much higher.

    ReplyDelete