A week ago, I wrote:

The world is full of beau­ti­ful and strange things. Indone­sian insects with eyes on stalks, African mole rats, Ama­zon­ian par­rots and Chi­nese snake­head fish.

We can get so caught up in the exot­ic world of oth­er places that we for­get the strange and fas­ci­nat­ing right under our own noses.

I’ll make it a Fri­day mis­sion to remind myself and my read­ers of a few of the things that we might oth­er­wise miss.

Today’s Fri­day Find is a Sphinx moth cater­pil­lar, or I guess parts of it. Here we can see the feet of the cater­pil­lar, hold­ing tight to the plant it’s chew­ing away on.

Click through to see more.

The com­mon name for the fam­i­ly is the horn­worms, because of that spike. I’m pret­ty sure this is a Lau­rel Sphinx, based on the col­ors of the spike on the end of the beast­ie’s tail. The spike can be expand­ed when the cater­pil­lar is ner­vous, and it will some­times rear up in a pose that remind­ed peo­ple of a sphinx, hence the com­mon name for the species, and the name of this fam­i­ly of moths: Sphingidae. 

These moths and cater­pil­lars are com­mon through­out North Amer­i­ca and the world. Some in the fam­i­ly hov­er over flow­ers like hum­ming­birds. Most are fair­ly cryp­tic as adults, but their shape and the pat­tern of col­ors is remark­ably ele­gant. They are sub­tle enough to hide in plain sight, but pret­ty enough to watch for hours.