Caterpillar ID

[Travis K]

My daughter found this guy crawling through a busy grocery store parking lot in Liberty Lake, WA. And this morning it started spinning silk. Any ideas on what species this is?

Time will tell what we end up with...

 

[Ariel]

looks like it could be a silk moth catipillar, possible the luna moth. I could be wrong, I'm no expert

 

[spiderfield]

Antheraea polyphemus or Polyphemus moth. One of the giant silkmoths of North America. Beautiful find! Depending on what your weather is like it may go into diapause, or produce a second generation while there's still foliage around. If its starting to look and feel like fall where your at, you can leave the cocoon outdoors until next spring (they'll overwinter). As adults they do not feed, just mate and pass. If you have a female you can cage her outdoors and she can attract wild males, or if he's male you can try finding a female for him, otherwise you could let him go and fulfill his duty. Good luck!

 

[Ariel]

well...I figured it was a silk moth LOL. I acctually didn't know Polyphemus were silk moths. Nice find though!!! they're pretty awesome, this is one that we found on our door one morning:

 

[spiderfield]

Yea, they're very cool, especially the larva once they reach their final instar...some species get pretty massive. When I first started breeding Lepidopterans in college, I thought silk moths were confined to the typical Mulberry Silk moth (Bombyx mori), but then I found out that taxonomy-wise they weren't classified into the same family as the giant silk moths; the former belonging to Bombycidae, the latter Saturniidae. If you want to see a real beauty you should check out the Atlas moth (Attacus atlas), with adults reaching wingspans of about a foot! True beauties!

 

[Ariel]

oooh! the atlas moths are so awesome! We have them in the butterfly exibit at the omaha zoo

 

[Bugs In Cyberspace]

Spent some time collecting in Arizona last month and was lucky to see quite a few Polyphemus moths (though a different sub-species) come to the light set-ups. Never a disappointment, these giants!

I have yet to see one in the Pacific Northwest, though a local contact found a mating pair outside his window in Tigard, Oregon last year.