WHEN you think of caterpillars you envisage a little green insect larvae eating away at a leaf and then turning into a beautiful butterfly.

The process of metamorphosis turns a little green caterpillar into a multi-coloured butterfly that catches the eye.

However, not everything that starts life as a caterpillar becomes a beautiful butterfly.

Moths are commonly regarded as the poor relation to the butterfly, due to their less intense colours that they use more for camouflage than for display.

Your average moth will have swept-back wings when it is resting on a tree or plant whereas a butterfly will have its wings folded and lifted skywards.

Moths are reasonably difficult to see when they are resting because, in a lot of cases, they develop a colouring to resemble their surroundings. This camouflage is used to evade predators.

Due to the use of camouflage, moths could be seen as dull creatures and not treated with the respect and awe that butterflies tend to receive.

However, when it comes to caterpillars, the moth is just as impressive and, in some cases, beats the butterfly hands down.

The caterpillar of the Vapourer Moth is one such beastie.

It is one of the punks of the caterpillar world, having a black body that is covered in loads of red and yellow spots looking like hundreds of eyes.

Its body is also covered in thousands of long, thin, black hairs.

Some of these hairs are quite thick and rigid-looking and form little groups that look almost like spikes.

As well as all of this there are also four plumes of dense yellow and white hair across the caterpillar's back.

These caterpillars live on a wide range of deciduous shrubs and trees.

They have undergone their metamorphosis into moths by June and then live their adult life until October.

In October the moths lay eggs which will hatch into new caterpillars the following year.

The Vapourer Moth has another interesting characteristic because only the male can fly.

The female moth cannot fly at all and spends the whole of her life resting on trees and shrubs, getting ready to lay a new clutch of eggs to ensure her genes survive into the following year.

Next year keep an eye out for a strange, spiky-looking caterpillar and, while you are out in your garden this summer, see if you can spot a moth crawling around in the shrubs.