Baby Cloudless Sulphur

Here's a baby (caterpillar would be more conventional terms) Cloudless Sulphur. I took this picture over 4 years ago and didn't know what it was. This morning when I logged into iNaturalist, it had an ID of Cloudless Sulphur. I then looked that up in my Caterpillars of Eastern North America, and agreed that this was indeed a Cloudless Sulphur caterpillar.

You might ask why I didn't just use my caterpillar field guide in the first place:

  1. I'm not sure I owned the field guide back in 2016.
  2. I wasn't sure this was a caterpillar. Some of the larvae of flies and wasps look pretty similar to moth/butterfly caterpillars.
  3. My field guide has over 400 pages of caterpillar species in it, and flipping through them all is either a very slow process or a fairly error-prone process.
  4. Despite all those caterpillars in the field guide, it's not complete. 
    1. My field guide did show me a picture of the Clouded Sulphur caterpillar, so I was able to rule that out as a candidate.
    2. It didn't show me an Orange Sulphur caterpillar, but the documentation of the Clouded Sulphur caterpillar said that the Orange Sulphur caterpillar looks similar. (I could have guessed that, since they look quite similar as adults and are closely enough related to be able to hybridize.)
    3. It didn't have anything about my area's 4th sulphur butterfly. I had to go to the internet to check that one out.
    4. In defense of the field guide, it's fairly big now, and to fill it in with every caterpillar might make it too unwieldy to use.
Having said all that, these days I know that our sulphur caterpillars like eating legumes like senna and it's relatives; I probably should have attempted to identify it as a sulphur, which consist of only 4 species (two of which are probably too similar to differentiate).

September 25, 2016 at Duke Farms


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