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Hornwormscaterpillar?
I know the pictures are bad. But I’m hoping you can i.d. this guy (there are actually five on the plant) munching on our silver buttonwood. It’s sort of orange with a darker orange broad band going down the length of its back. It has a creamy colored head. Any ideas? Thank you! I love your site!
Joseph
Hi Joseph,
Based on assumptions we have made, this could be an Arrow Sphinx, Lophostethus dumolinii, if you live in South Africa. Your photo is of a Sphinx Moth Caterpillar, and we typed sphinx and buttonwood into a google search and came up with a species that feeds on that tree. We found a photo of the adult moth, but not the caterpillar, so we might not be right, especially since we don’t know from what part of the world you wrote.
We figured it was some sort of a Sphinx moth, but we are actually in South Florida. Do you have any other guesses based on our region?
A new web search led us to this bit of information about Silver Buttonwood: “Occasional larval host plant for martial hairstreak (Strymon martialis) butterflies and Tantalus Sphinx (Aellopus tantalus) moths.” Sadly, we couldn’t locate an image of the larva online to verify that it is your caterpillar.
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