Caterpillar ID please

[pammosley]

Hi folks there were a couple of these little fellows crawling on the outside of a hide at a Wetland center. We have tried in vain to ID them
Any help much appreciated
We did find this site which is really good on our quest-we searched all through it
But of course it may not be a butterfly or moth caterpillar

Lepidoptera Species by Common Name in Alphabetical Order

[k4t3]

Looks like a butterfly or moth caterpillar as number of prolegs right, but have been all the way through Porter and can't find anything that remotely looks like this Will keep searching tho.....

[pammosley]

Thanks for helping k4t3, much appreciated We will keep searching as well

[earthdragon64]

It's Depressaria daucella, have a look on UK Moths, from memory it isn't actually in Porter. It's one I found last year and got identified on the Yahoo! Scottish Moths group.

[k4t3]

That looks like the little devil! Teach me to think that Porter is the be all and end all caterpillar tome!
Been all over the place trying to find this one for pammosley...but suppose if had no point of reference, would never have found it on UKmoths myself

[poschiavanus]

Porter only covers Butterflies and Macro-moths. Depressaria daucella is a micro.

[k4t3]

I stand corrected, and thereby educated..thx!

[earthdragon64]

Porter is pretty good, but as poschiavanus says, it only covers macro lepidoptera, and generally only shows the final instar of those. If you look at the UK Leps site linked to in the opening post, early instars can look completely different to final instars.

If you have an early instar macro, or any micro, it's really difficult getting an ID, unless you want to click through every single micro on UK Moths, and not all of them have larval photos. That's where sites like this or Scottish Moths on Yahoo! are invaluable.

[k4t3]

Understand that early instars are hard to id unless you have knowledge of the species and admit that most micros are an enigma to me...just here to try to help and to learn all I can
Sorry pammosley, we seem to have hijacked your thread

[pammosley]

Thanks for all your help folks, I`ve learned alot & you haven`t hi-jacked my thread it`s all relevant
We all will never stop learning & thats a great thing