Such a change of colour occurs in many species of
caterpillars. Sometimes the change is seasonal; and, in those which
hibernate with us, the colour of some species, which is brownish in
autumn in adaptation to the fading foliage, becomes green in spring to
harmonise with the newly-opened leaves at that season.[71]
Some of the most curious examples of minute imitation are afforded by
the caterpillars of the geometer moths, which are always brown or
reddish, and resemble in form little twigs of the plant on which they
feed. They have the habit, when at rest, of standing out obliquely from
the branch, to which they hold on by their hind pair of prolegs or
claspers, and remain motionless for hours. Speaking of these protective
resemblances Mr. Jenner Weir says: "After being thirty years an
entomologist I was deceived myself, and took out my pruning scissors to
cut from a plum tree a spur which I thought I had overlooked. This
turned out to be the larva of a geometer two inches long. I showed it
to several members of my family, and defined a space of four inches in
which it was to be seen, but none of them could perceive that it was a
caterpillar.
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