Dali House

A recent Monday at work got off to a terrific start when I scaled the stairs to the roof so I could have a smoke while proofreading pages and the creature above was there to say hello. He was crawling across the wooden slats of the upper deck. I used one of my pages to scoop him onto the wooden slats of a picnic table instead so I could have a better look.

It’s a good thing I used a page instead of my fingers. As I discovered later while finding out what the hell it was, this caterpillar squirts toxins when molested.

I didn’t molest him for long. In fact I placed him gently on a shrub. When I returned to the roof with another batch of pages about an hour later, of course, he was back on the slats making a wormline for … somewhere. A subsequent visit found him gone altogether, either tucked away turning into a pupa or snatched up by a bird.

This is the caterpillar of the Oleander Sphinx moth — Daphnis nerii — a hawk-moth found from southern Europe to the subtropics of Africa and Asia.

I didn’t have a camera, so I’ve purloined these photos from the ThaiPulse Blog and ThaiBugs.com.

And, as I read at TPittaway, a tripod site, this was a full-grown larva, apple-green with a white dorso-lateral line to the orange “horn” at its tail and a pair of “eye-spots” that, as I personally witnessed, widen when the caterpillar goes into defensive mode.

It tucks its tiny head down and boosts out its anterior segments at the shoulders so the “eyes” bulge.

And here’s what it turns into, the pupa.

And below is what the pupa turns into — probably Nature’s most excellent camouflage job!

Another moth turned up the same week, but only in my reading. The Daily Mail was featuring some award-winning microphotography, and the dazzler below turned out to be the wing scales of a Madagascan sunset moth, Chrysiridia rhipheus. The shot won Charles Krebs of Washington State an honorable mention in this year’s Nikon Small World competition.

And over at Wikipedia, a terrific picture of the sunset moth itself.