Extremely Tiny Inchworm
Sam came back from a walk in the woods on July 13, 2025, and felt something tickling her arm. On examination, she found this very small inchworm (actually more like an eighth-inch worm) briskly inching its way along her arm.
For caterpillars, these guys can really cook along when they want to move. Every loop-and-stretch moves them along most of a body length, and they can do it every couple of seconds, making them a lot faster than conventional caterpillars.
They can also bridge gaps between leaves this way, so they can get from leaf to leaf much easier than by regular straight-line crawling.
This little guy had obviously hatched relatively recently, probably no more than a few days earlier. And at this age, all geometrid caterpillars look about the same. I did run it through Google Image Search to see what it could come up with, and the answer in this case was “nothing useful”. The Google AI helpfully told me that it was “a caterpillar”, and the image hits were pretty much every reddish-brown wormy thing on the Internet. That’s fair, though. The only way to get a positive ID would have been to rear it, and since we hadn’t the slightest idea of its food plant[1], that was obviously not going to happen.
At any rate, as Sam said, “He’s kind of cute, isn’t he?”
[1] I am reasonably certain that humans are not their normal food plant.