Variety of unidentifed lepidopteran larvae

[poschiavanus]

I found a couple of larvae the other day which have left me puzzled. For good measure I've thrown in two more from early May.

1. On grass in calcareous grassland. Green larvae with small brown heads. Not even sure these are leps, as I wasn't sure if they really had prolegs or whether the bumps on the abdomen were just fleshy protuberances. There also seemed to be small pupal cases on grass heads in the same location.


2. On Grey Sallow. Small pale (whitish) caterpillar with black head, and black pro-thoracic plate living under rolled leaf edge of Grey Sallow. Small (under 10mm).


3. On Red Clover (early May). 4 prolegs.


4. On Common Lime (early May). 4 prolegs. Feel sure I should have got this one, but not making any headway!


Thanks in advance for any comments,

Posch

[charlieb]

1. I have found similar larvae on broomrape before but have had no luck in ID'ing it. I would suggest ID'ing the grasses they were on and going from there. They look like Tortricidae to me.

3. Looks like a Tortricidae.

4. The Dun-bar Cosmia trapezina

[charlieb]

Meant to say the pupal case of 1 looks distinctive too - might be worth keeping in the back of your mind

[poschiavanus]

Thanks very much charlieb. Dun-Bar was certainly one I had on the short-list. Agree on the clover one being a tortrix: the larva is reminiscent of Timothy Tortrix. I'll have to plough through the clover feeding ones.

As for number 1, I have a nagging feeling this might be a weevil. I've seen weevil pupal cases which were similar to this one. Also the head seems very small for a lep.

Identifying grasses might be harder for me than trying to rear them through!

Cheers,

Posch

[charlieb]

Originally Posted by poschiavanus

Agree on the clover one being a tortrix: the larva is reminiscent of Timothy Tortrix.

Doesn't look like a Tim Tortix to me - Tim Tortrix has quite pronounced white pinacula.

Originally Posted by poschiavanus

As for number 1, I have a nagging feeling this might be a weevil. I've seen weevil pupal cases which were similar to this one. Also the head seems very small for a lep.

I don't know much, if anything, about weevil larvae - I would be very interested in what hatches out!

[poschiavanus]

Wasn't very clear: I didn't mean that it was a Tim Tortrix, just that there was a degree of similarity. Either way with the tortrix hint, I now wonder if this might be the larva of the Pea Moth Cydia nigricana. It's rather darker than the pictures I've seen on the web, but has these show similar distribution of pinacula, the darker two-segmented pro-thoracic plate. Also there is only Grapholita (=Cydia) compositella listed as a tortrix using Red Clover as a food-plant on the York University ecoflora site. Can't find any photos of the latter's larva but they are pretty small moths, so I'd favour the larger of the two.

[charlieb]

Have you tried CATERPILLAR HOSTPLANTS DATABASE - The natural History Museum

[poschiavanus]

I usually use the ecoflora as it's host plant lists for leps are based on the Monks Wood Phytophagous Insects DB and have been verified by John Grearson. Also I extracted the relevant files a long time ago so I have it to hand!

The NHM one seems to usually include a few extra species over and above the PIDB, and I suspect some of these may be based on non-British records (even when you use the filter) of host plant association.

The ecoflora is weaker for other groups (Hets, Beetles etc), and may use out-dated synonyms, but its a pretty good starting point. I find the NHM pages a pain to navigate: the recent changes to the leaf-mining flies project just to put everything into some kind of house style and had nothing to do with the making them convenient for users.

In this particular case NHM has fewer records of clover-feeding leps than the ecoflora.