Eastern black swallowtail caterpillar

Description:

Butterfly watch day 15! Today was stressful as the paper wasps came in to take away some of the caterpillars. It's almost like they knew which ones were "ripe." Definitely lost a few, but I defended a lot of them. It's hard to count how many cats are left because they keep moving around and are better at camouflage. There are definitely different stages going on. Some are smaller, some have molted a few times (as you can see by one of the pics above). Just trying to keep as many of them alive as possible. My guess is somewhere between 25-35 are still on my plant

Habitat:

Dill plant, west central ga

Notes:

PS I have a plan to maybe fend off the wasps and birds tomorrow! Linkback to last photo in the cycle in references. Additional reference: http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/bfly...