Odis - Leafy Spurge Hawkmoth

Last night, the Young Women, Young Men, and their leaders were cleaning along the edges of the highway as a service project.  We have a 2 mile strip of highway that our youth are in charge of cleaning, twice-a-year.  Last night as we were cleaning, one of the boys found Odis (the name I gave him) hanging on a weed stem, eating.  He brought him over to me and I thought he would make a good Kinder, science project.  For now, I have him in an ice cream bucket with some leaves, a stalk of clover, and a little water.  School starts on Monday, May 22nd, and Odis will be my guest in the Kinder classroom.  We did this project a few years back with other caterpillars and the students really enjoyed it.  They went outside to gather leaves to feed the caterpillars and witnessed the process of the caterpillar turning into pupae (cocoon).  The caterpillars stayed in their pupae the entire school year so the students were not able to witness the marvel of them changing into butterfly's.  The teacher and I went into the classroom one day to find they had come out of their pupae - beautiful! 

Upon searching the Internet, I found out that Odis is a Leafy Spurge Hawkmoth Caterpillar (Hyles euphorbiae) a European species introduced to help control the Leafy Spurge.  To read more about Otis, go here.  Leafy Spurge is an aggressive perennial weed that can completely overtake large areas of open land.