Caterpillar Crisis
One day we were out sitting on the deck, writing in our nature journals, when someone spotted a big green caterpillar!! It was HUGE! We looked it up on the internet and found out that it was a Pandora Sphinx Moth. We read that it ate grape vine leaves and Woodbine leaves (Virginia Creeper), so I went to get it some. When I got to the vine I picked a leaf, and I looked up and AAAAHHHH!! Hundreds of caterpillars were all over it!! Some were big, and some were small. The big caterpillars didn't have any horns, and the small caterpillars had a long horn on their rump. The big ones just had something that looked like an eye where the horn used to be. All of us kids had to get on gloves and pick every single caterpillar off the vine and put them in a bucket of soapy water to kill them. YUCK!
Mom said "No wonder my vine was dying, they were eating it!"
We saved a few caterpillars to see if they would turn into a Pandora Sphinx Moth (we have never seen them before), but they all got hard and died after a while. We read that they fly at night and suck nectar from Petunias.
I could not find a photo of the Pandora Sphinx caterpillar, only the moth below.
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