Star-wort caterpillar

Short and sweet tonight! I've been up since 5am and now it's nearly dinner time. And the white wine's already kicked in so I'm probably not very coherent. A good day on the whole - more or less painless train travel to a bijou Kent sand quarry with a very nice supervisor who picked me up from the station in his BMW.

I took lots of photographs of the quarry and the interesting things I found - including a badger sett and latrine, a group of slow-worms, the largest colony of Andrena flavipes (a mining-bee) I've ever seen and a cannabis plant growing in a pot! But I try not to blip work photographs, so instead I bring you a stripy caterpillar - the larva of the star-wort moth..

This species is mainly coastal in distribution, occurring along the eastern and southern coasts of England from Yorkshire to Dorset, with a few scattered localities inland in the south-east. We found our small caterpillars in Suffolk and brought home two to rear.

They normally eat the flowers of sea aster but occasionally they turn up in gardens and then eat the flowers of Michaelmas-daisies and China Aster. Ours are growing rapidly now, and will soon be ready to pupate. I particularly like the striped pattern of mauve and yellow, which tones so well with the Michaelmas daisies it's eating - not to mention the spotty head!