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Green morph of Hyles gallii?
Hi,
A Fireweed plant (Epilobium angustifolium) volunteered to grow in my backyard last year. Since it is both one of my favourite native plants and the bees love it, I let it be. This year there is a small stand of them providing some urban habitat for a variety of creatures; I’ve got: bees (at least 5 species), ants, beetles, wasps, flies, moths, and one 6-7cm long hornworm which I have not been able to find an identical photo of on the web. I am hoping you can help identify it. After looking at all 14 pages of caterpillar pictures, following your links, and trying out some of the ID keys at other sites–I am thinking it is a late instar of a green variation of the Bedstraw Hawk moth/Gallium Sphinx (Hyles gallii) larvae. I have attached top and side views of the caterpillar at rest, and a couple of it feeding on a flower bud (appears to be its favourite food) which have better views of the two types of legs. I haven’t been able to get good, clear, closeup photos of the head and tail views, yet. Sending you over 16M of photos didn’t seem like a good idea so I scaled them down to 240×320 pixels, stripped out the EXIF data, and saved them `for the web’ on the offhand chance one is interesting enough to put up on your site. Full resolution images are available if necessary.
Bruce
Edmonton, Alberta

Hi Bruce,
Thanks for sending what we also believe is a Gallium Sphinx Caterpillar, Hyles gallii. The small files enabled us to determine which of your large files to download. We are going to copy Bill Oehlke on this response to see if he agrees and also so he can add this information to his comprehensive species distribution data.

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