Scarlet Tiger Moth Callimorpha dominula Larva

e6filmuser

I found this caterpillar on a brick wall, to be precise, the wall of the porch of a brick-built terraced house. This particular house was in a street where front gardens are tiny and mostly devoid of plants. So I don’t know where it came from but suspected that it was on pre-hibernation ramblings. This is one of the species which overwinter as small larvae.

A quick look at the larva told me that it was an unfamiliar species with very distinctive markings. When I got it back to my home I took a close look with a hand lens. By consulting my reference book on caterpillars, I was able to be sure that it was the Scarlet Tiger moth. My previous encounter, in July, was with the adult moth, in my own back garden:

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1373444/

I doubted that the larva would want to feed but put it on a leaf of one of its food plants, bramble, as a preferred background. It remained fairly static on that, until I started photographing it, when it mostly kept walking around, clearly wanting to get off the leaf. I took a series of shots with triple flash. I started with my Kiron 105mm, at maximum magnification, giving a field of view of 17.5mm, indicating the length of the caterpillar to be about 12mm. Some of those were shot as stereo pair and are presented as cross-eye stereograms.

Then I moved to higher magnification, FOV 6mm wide, with reversed Schneider HM 40 on a Kiron x1.5 TC. Tracking the head of the larva and capturing focused images was very difficult but I have a few to post here.

Harold



Looking down at 45 degrees

e6filmuser

I have recently found some motion blur in flash images with the HM40:

Here are reworked images.

Harold