= New photos, last 60 daysCaterpillar ID can very difficult! Most of these have been identified by using the few books available on the subject and lots of help from Dave Wagner. Three others who helped greatly are Henning von Schmeling, Mike Thomas, and Steve Krotzer. Henning not only helped finding cats, he has been a great help identifying host plants, as has Malcolm Hodges. Still others who helped with a few are Sam Jaffe, Ryan St Laurent, Bob Barber, Jim Tuttle, and Tim McCabe... .
Useful books:
-Caterpillars of Eastern North America by Dave Wagner.
If you are interested in identifying caterpillars and live in the East, GET THIS BOOK. It is extremely good, and thorough, and also has many moths. (Princeton 2005).
-Caterpillars of the Field and Garden by Allen, Brock, and Glassberg.
Helpful, with good photos, but has only butterflies and covers all of N America so less useful for any single region in the East (Oxford 2005).
-Out of print, but indispensable if you care about noctuids, is Owlet caterpillars of Eastern North America by Wagner, Schweitzer, Sullivan, and Reardon (Princeton 2011)
Note that many of the images on this page are of prepupal caterpillars and their color may change drastically from what is typically depicted in the guides for each species.
I have these caterpillars arranged by Hodges number, and mostly follow Dr Wagner's common names. Ones I still can't identify are in the section at the bottom. Please let me know if you find any misidentified ones or can help with id!
Note also that for the first few years I was hunting and photographing caterpillars I didn't pay attention to host plants (much to my regret now). If the file name does not include host plant info then I failed to record it.
This site is being published in March 2020, and many of the pages have been brought over from my old site but are not yet cleaned up from transcription issues... please be patient with me!
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