A couple of days ago a reader sent us an amazing picture of a yellow caterpillar with black eyes. (These “eyes” are in fact eyespots, which serve no optical function, but more on this in a moment.) She had found a couple of the yellow caterpillars on her back porch and was wondering if we might be able to help with the task of identification. Although caterpillars can be extremely difficult to identify because of the sheer number of different species, we are reasonably confident our reader found a Spicebush Swallowtail caterpillar, one of the hundreds of species of Swallowtail caterpillars.

Via the All About Worms Facebook page, we recently received a question about a “kind of worm” that appears to have two eyes. Overall, the worm is yellow, but on one end of its body it has black spots that look exactly like eyes. The eyes on the yellow worm are quite large, to the point that they look somewhat cartoonish. The reader sent a superb picture of the creature and only asked what kind of worm it is. So, we are tasked with a question of identification: what kind of worms are yellow and have large eyes?