My neighbor, the artist Diane Artz Furlong, photographed these extraordinary caterpillars in her garden last week. With her permission, I’m reposting the photos here…
Diane writes that,
Just when I thought I was done with the Japanese beetle onslaught (not!) I find these guys on my rose bush. I would never have found them, though, had I not brushed my hand up against them. They sting! Quite painfully, too. They are saddleback caterpillars (from the slug caterpillar family) and they are the larvae of a brown moth. Fairly harmless except for the sting, these are about 1/2 inch long and that’s a rose leaf they are on. After some research and learning they’ll eat anything I decided to put them on a wild grape vine far from my rose bushes. Hope they are happy.
Oh! and I put some aloe sap on the stings and the pain subsided quickly after that.
Wild looking animals – I love the diversity of nature…
I found one of these once when I managed a lab in Alabama. It was larger than yours, about 1 1/2″ long I knocked it into a bug jar and showed it to several people to find out what it was. One guy took off running – backwards – while shouting “Kill it! Kill it! KILL IT!” He was a an ex-MP, Vietnam vet, and a military school graduate. I hid the caterpillar and asked him what it was and why he was terrified of the insect. He said that when he was teenager in Florida another boy played a prank on him and put one of these down the back of his shirt. Apparently the welts swelled up, became infected, and required him to lay on his stomach for over a week until they healed. From then on he felt that all saddleback caterpillars needed to be killed on sight.
This morning, Sept. 9, 2014 I was in the bedroom and my husband came into the kitchen and said here is the paper, I love you. I said, where are you going? He said out to the garage(in our yard). I sent in kitchen and there was a beautiful long stem rose off our rose bush (only one). I thought how sweet, how many husbands would have thought of that. I proceeded to put in bud vase and I noticed couple leaves had beaten by an insect. I didn’t see any bugs so I pulled two leaves off and both of my hands started stinging where something had got me. I looked and found two of these creatures, never seen before. Looked them up on computer, said to put aloe sap on the sting. I didn’t have any so I used sunscreen with aloe in it and got relief.
Hope this helps someone to know.