Yellow woolly bear
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The Yellow woolly bear caterpillar, spilosoma virginica, is the larva of the Virginia tiger moth. It has a diet of a wide range of low-growing plants, including ground cover like grass and clover. This species tends to have two to three life cycles per year, with one hibernating for the winter in temperate climates.
[edit] Identification
The caterpillar varies in color, but is typically consistent in its coloration in a single specimen, without odd tufts of different-color hair or separately colored heads.
The adult moth tends to tent its wings over its back, rather than sitting with them spread, and is white with a darker-colored abdomen, but without the obvious, darker eyes of its close cousin the agreeable tiger moth.
[edit] Reproduction
The female is slightly larger than the male in larva form, and as an adult finds a mate by extruding an organ which emits a pheremone which the male can smell. The male, which unlike the female has the large, feathered antennae characteristic of pheromone-using moths, flies zigzag patterns in search for such a smell, eventually homing in on a female, mating, and then going off to find other females, while the female stops to lay between twenty and one hundred eggs in a single layer on the underside of a leaf. The larvae stay together when very young, but become solitary as they gain size.
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