“What is this?” is all this reader writes to us about the brown caterpillar in this excellent photograph below. At the tip of this cute creature sits its voluptuous head, adorned with pink, triangular markings, as well as some cartoon-like, yellow eyespots.

‘My grandchildren and I found a tiger swallowtail caterpillar in Wilson, NC” says this reader in her submission to us. As we can see in the photo below, this caterpillar is an olive green color, with speckles of light green and white adorning its body, and it has a large head with two eye spots with a black stripe underneath.

A woman in Maryland found this worm swimming in her mother-in-law’s toilet and hopes that we can help ID the critter. The worm in questions appears to be a mottled brown color, with a segmented body and a yellow band near its head, as well as a pair of eye spots just below the stripe.

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.