“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.

One of our readers sent us an email asking about a specific caterpillar that has yellow stripes. This caterpillar was eating one specific plant in her yard and it is about an inch in length. This is a very tough one because this caterpillar could be a number of species. There are about 180,000 species of caterpillars in the world, so without a picture, this has been a hard one to determine.

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.