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THE HICKORY HORNED DEVIL
At six inches or more in length and covered with ouchy-looking horns and spikes, this may be the most startling caterpillar you are likely to encounter in the USA. Despite their appearance, the horns and spikes are actually flexible and not sharp at all. When bothered or annoyed, the caterpillar uses the considerable strength of its fat six-inch body to whip its horns in the direction of the predator. This is apparently rather disconcerting to anything considering making a meal of it.
The hickory horned devil is the larva of Citheronia regalis, generally known as the regal moth or royal walnut moth. With a wingspan over five inches and a solid body, this is arguably the most massive moth in North America.
You are much more likely to run into the caterpillar than the moth. Eggs are laid in early summer, and the caterpillars spend all summer crawling around and getting humongous before overwintering as pupae. Some particularly lazy ones actually stay in this stage for two entire winters before waking up. While you've got all summer to catch a look at the hickory horned devil, you'll only get a week in the spring to spot the adult... members of this family emerge from their pupal stage with no functional mouth parts and only live about a week. While this seems like poor planning on Mother Nature's part, adult moths are very effective at what they do, and a week seems to be plenty of time to get the job done.
While they are bright green or even turquoise at their largest, hickory horned devils hatch as dark-colored creatures and change colors repeatedly as they grow. This is a fairly small one.
This is NOT a small one.
Hickory horned devils hatch and feed primarily on nut trees, such as walnut and hickory, but will also munch on privet and related plants. Apparently there is much to be said for the nutritional value of this diet.
Like all butterflies and moths, these creatures are members of the order Lepidoptera. One of the main distinguishing characteristics of this order are the wings, which are covered with an extremely fine layer of scales which are actually modified hairs. These scales are what allow the lepidoptera to display such amazing patterns and colors, and they also accomplish another neat trick: because the scales will easily come off, many moths can escape from spider webs as the threads will stick to the scales and the moth will squirm free. With a five-inch wingspan, though, I suspect it would have to be a very large spider that would concern this moth.
The hickory horned devil (and I keep calling it that because "royal walnut moth" is rather dull in comparison) belongs to the family Saturniidae, which includes some of the largest and most gorgeous of moths:
Polyphemus Moth
Luna Moth
Cecropia Moth
The Saturniidae are some of the largest living insects in terms of wingspan, and they are also stunningly beautiful. Like our featured moth, though, as adults they have only vestigal mouthparts and don't eat at all. But... back to our hickory horned devil!
Despite looking fairly alarming, they are apparently very calm and if handled gently will quite happily crawl over your hand. They are not known to be chemically protected, which means that their defense basically consists of wildly flailing those horns at anything that bothers it.
The Saturniidae are popular among hobbyist breeders and many of them can be found for sale online, but one must keep in mind that a caterpillar this large is going to eat MASSIVE AMOUNTS of food, so unless you have a basically unlimited supply of their host plant, don't bother.
For more information, check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citheronia_regalis
http://hilarynelson.com/Hobbies/Bugs/HickoryHornedDevilCaterpillar
And a very cool video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT52brviTGI
(won't allow embedding, so you'll have to follow the link)