DEILEPHILA LINEATA 99 



All the caterpillars had a (lueer way of moving the 

 caudal horn as a finger is moved up and down without 

 bending it or moving the hand. They were very 

 active, and dropped from the stems when disturbed, 

 instead of clinging faster as most caterpillars do. 

 They jerked the fore part of the body from side to side, 

 as T. ahhotii larvae do when startled. 



Four days later they molted for the fifth time, and 

 there came out two distinct forms of coloration. One 

 was mustard-yellow striated with blue-black, with a 

 yellow dot on each segment, and yellow lines as before, 

 but with the horn longer in proportion and still rough, 

 and the S]3iracles orange encircled with black. The 

 other form was apple-green with much less black, the 

 subdorsal line being a series of yellow spots inclosing 

 an orange dot, and set on the black patch on each seg- 

 ment, with a very faint trace of yellow connecting the 

 spots. One caterpillar had no orange. They moved 

 their horns like fingers or antenna in this stage also. 



For six days they fed voraciously, keeping us busy 

 enough in supplying leaves, and they grew very fast, 

 the shortest being over three inches long, the longest 

 nearly three and a half. 



After each molt every caterpillar ate up his cast 

 skin even to the rough horn, leaving only the mask. 

 This habit of eating the cast skin certainly removes 

 one trace of caterpillar presence, but it seems very 

 useless, if this is the cause, for the great oblong " balls " 

 of excrement are a conspicuous guide by which one 

 can track a caterpillar all over the garden — if it 

 crawls as far as that. Caterpillars digest their food so 

 rapidly that excretion must be very frequent. 



