“This caterpillar looks like a snake”, states this reader in Springfield, Illinois. He refers to the yellow, segmented organism below, which sports two big eyespots and a pattern of spots on its body.

A bright, yellow caterpillar with gray spots and big black eyes was found by one of our readers. She did not pose any question, but simply wanted to share these excellent photos with us. This article will address what this caterpillar is in case any of our other readers happens upon one.

One of our readers sent us a great picture of a yellow caterpillar with black eyespots. In doing our research, we noticed that it is the Spicebush Swallowtail caterpillar. It seems that these caterpillars love to come out in the fall because we had many of our readers asking about them.

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.