Mer Bleue Conservation Area. This tiny caterpillar is on hound's-tongue plant (Cynoglossum officinale). The few plants I saw alongside the trail all had early instar haploa caterpillars on them, some a little bigger than this. It amazes me that the soft-bodied caterpillars can crawl around the sticky, prickly seeds without problem. These seeds seem to fly off the plant whenever a person or animal gets close and are hard to pick off, so how the caterpillars do it is a mystery! These caterpillars spend the winter as early instar caterpillars, and are not seen again until spring. I often see them in May/June on hound's-tongue plants and the moths, which are quite dramatic in shape and boldly patterned in black or brown and white, appear in summer.