small, dark caterpillars

[eeksypeeksy]

I wish I had a camera, but I'll just have to describe them.

This morning on the ground (bare dirt, not on a plant, but under a tree) in the garden, I found what must be a few hundred small, dark caterpillars wiggling together. Not quite black, maybe a very dark, dull brown with a relatively reddish face parts.

What small, dark caterpillar would emerge so late in the year and hang about together just wiggling in a heap on the ground like that?

The butterflies I remember seeing in the garden in the summer were peacocks, whites (cabbage), and brimstones. I have no idea what sort of beasties are there at night, but we do, of course, get moths.

They don't look like the little green devils that ate the kohlrabi.

[eeksypeeksy]

Does this link work? Someone took a picture for me.

[PurpleDragon]

I don't know what they are - not really 'up' on caterpillars, but I got an email from a gardening list I'm on the other day saying to put bands round the trunks of trees to stop moth larvae crawling up the tree to live off it till the spring. I wonder if they are them? Don't understand why there are a whole bunch of them though ...

[eeksypeeksy]

I'm wondering now if they fell out of the large tree that is just over the fence, maybe because some hungry bird opened up a cocoon.

I just don't want to squash them indiscriminately.

For example, we get lovely peacock butterflies in the garden that I wouldn't want to wipe out. I don't think these buggers can be peacocks, though, because peacocks reproduce after winter hibernation, right? But if they're something that's going to eat up everything in the garden, I want to catch them all in tiny Havahart traps and transport them to a caterpillar rehabilitation facility. Or squash them with my boot. Quite discriminately.

[Millymollymandy]

I've seen the odd black hairy caterpillar here and there in the last few weeks. I always assume they are Peacock or Red Admirals (or a couple of other ones) because they are black and hairy. Of course they could be other butterflies or moths too but I don't kill things indiscriminately!

I'd let them go if I were you.

[eeksypeeksy]

I sent the picture to the biggest butterfly expert at Copernicus University and he very kindly had a look. It turns out they aren't little caterpillars, as I had daftly presumed, but the spiny little larvae of March flies (Bibionidae family).

Or they were the larvae of March flies. They vanished while I was at work. Food for the birds? Or back underground? In any case, they should be fairly harmless and may even help with pollination, if I've read the available web pages correctly, though apparently in large numbers they can do some root damage.

[Muddypause]

They look like something I had invade a bunch of stinging nettles in a corner of the garden a couple of years ago. Thousands of them seemed to come from nowhere, absolutely devastated the plants (voracious eaters), and then vanished. I didn't think they were catapillars because the legs were all wrong (catapillars = six legs at the front, four suckers at the back).

What is a march fly, anyway?

[eeksypeeksy]

What is a march fly, anyway?

Sorry I forgot to answer this before. Wee harmless fliers about the size and build of a mosquito, with hinged legs hanging down twice the length of their bodies. On a warm afternoon, they would fly in a small cloud hanging in one place under a tree. Mating, I suppose. The cloud was stationary but each fly in the cloud was flying in tight little loops, whirling and hooping.

Anyway, their larvae (if the professor is right and that's what these were) came and vanished in one night. I don't know whether they migrated horizontally or vertically (and are now somewhere under my herbs).