Unknown Blue Caterpillar from Tanzania might be a Stinging Slug Caterpillar

bugman

February 17th, 2011 at 6:49 am

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unidentified caterpillar
Location: Geita Villiage, Mwanza, Tanzania
February 17, 2011 3:07 am
Hi, my daughter spotted this brightly coloured fellow on our garden path we thought it was litter because of the colour. Its the end of the rainy season in Geita, Mwanza which is in north western Tanzania. He did not move very much although produced large quantities of black gunk when we picked him up and he was only about 3cm long. We have seen a most beautiful large butterfly in the garden with this unusual colouring, is it related?
Signature: Sandra Wronsley

Unknown Blue Caterpillar

Dear Sandra,
At first glance we thought this might be a Giant Silk Moth Caterpillar in the family Saturniidae, but your statement that is is only 3 centimeters long caused us to second guess that idea. Our second guess was that this might be a Stinging Slug Caterpillar in the family Limacodidae so we wrote to Bill Oehlke who runs the World’s Greatest Saturniidae Site to get his opinion. Bill wrote back: “Daniel, I agree with your assessments, but we could be wrong.“ We are going to post your caterpillar and tag it as unidentified in the hope that someone may be able to provide additional information. We strongly doubt that this blue caterpillar will metamorphose into the large butterfly you sighted, but that is pure conjecture since there is no photo of the butterfly and the caterpillar is unidentified, though we do believe it is probably a Moth Caterpillar.

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Comments 2

Paul wrote:
Hi,
I am Sandra’s husband and I too saw the specimen in question. My daughter had put it in a big glass tube and I noticed that it seemed slimey underneath and lacked real legs. It had short stumpy/bumps that looked like want-to-be-legs? Anyway, it was quite a mission to get it out of the tube as it stuck to the glass but eventuall climbed onto a stick. It moved VERY slowly. I hope that this helps.
Regards,
Paul.
Posted 17 Feb 2011 at 11:29 am ¶
bugman wrote:
This may be difficult, but now that you have posted a comment, you will be notified if there are any updates.
Posted 18 Feb 2011 at 1:56 am ¶