While hiking back up the hillside after recording some absolutely fantastic shots of a Tropical Screech Owl in Cara Iguana, Panama (more on that later), one of our party, Stan to be precise, noticed a caterpillar crawling through the groundcover that beggared the imagination in regard to just how large caterpillars grow. Jet black with a red head, bright orange legs, white bands, and possessing a truly nasty temper, this lethal looking larva would rear up toward anything that came near it. Making it appear even more menacing, as if its six inch length wasn’t sufficient, was a large, black horn on its tail that gained it the informal appellation among our party of “the hornworm from Hell.”
We knew, of course, that this was not the creature’s actual name; but just what was? A local man we questioned about it said that he didn’t know its name but that he tried very hard to avoid then when working in the area as they made a real mess when one stepped on them. Returning to Canopy Lodge and looking through the books in the library, we were unable to discover any clues to its identity.
Knowing that caterpillars are often much more easily identified by their host plants, while still in the field at Cara Iguana, I snapped this shot of the tree upon which we discovered three more of our mystery caterpillars feeding. Should anyone be able to put a name to this species of tree, or even better, to the caterpillar itself, I would be most grateful indeed. Should it be useful as a possible clue to learned identifiers, initial suspicions are that it may be a species of sphinx moth.
