We spent most of a lovely last Saturday at Sleeping Giant rummaging through the rocks for Plecoptera, Ephemeroptera and Trichoptera.
Nonetheless, while on land I wasn't able to resist my new, apparently addictive habit of scanning the undersides of leaves for 6- or 8-legged friends.
This first one is rather generic-looking, and thus far unidentified, but it had very impressively glued the leave into a little burrito before I rudely exposed its nest:
The next one was really exciting. As Kara pointed out, those bright colors and haphazard munching likely indicate status: Not For Eating. I hadn't ever seen such a funny shape, and after this reference to Prof. Dave Wagner's lesson, I decided to ask him what he thought of it. I was excited when he told me that I had correctly guessed, in identification attempts, that it is going to be a Slug Moth one day!
Slug Moths are Leps of the family Limacodidae, so named precisely because of these funny-looking caterpillars. The icing on the cake was the tiny spider that spun its web in the hole left by the very hungry caterpillar! You can just see it, above, against the white lid I'm holding to the back of the leaf.
The closest caterpillar image match that I could find was of the Yellow-Shouldered Slug Moth, Lithacodes fasciola. Likely a relative, but not the same species, that adult is pictured below.
*Thank-you to Rich for the first two photos!
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