S. cerisyi, S. ophthalmica, or S. saliceti??

Perhaps we have misidentified our Sphinx caterpillar that we had always thought was Smerinthus cerisyi!

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It seems we may have misidentified our little Spinx here. We are pretty sure it is a Smerinthus, but perhaps not cerisyi like we had thought. We did a little more research today and found that there are possibly as many as three Smerinthus species in our area: S. cerisyi, S. ophthalmica, and S. saliceti. The three are extremely similar species and are basically regional counterparts of each other, with cerisyi in the north and east, ophthalmica in the west, and saleceti in ​the southern-most Rocky Mountains and southern Arizona, yet all have been reported in our area after searching through many sources such as BugGuide and BAMONA. The only way to differentiate the three by physical appearance is to examine the adult moth, and even still, if it is female than it is impossible to differentiate between cerisyi and ophthalmica without DNA analysis. Based on shear region, however, we seem to be the best match for ophthalmica and secondly, cerisyi; saleciti seems very unlikely and it is possible that the Alameda County sightings of it on BAMONA are misidentifications of one of the other two.

​So, which is it exactly, S. cerisyi, or S. ophthalmica? The two species are incredibly similar and until 2010, ophthalmica was considered a subspecies of cerisyi by most authors, but a 3.5% difference in mitochondrial DNA was convincing enough to bring ophthalmica to full species rank. Although we have not reared our caterpillar to moth yet to see which moth's phenotypic appearance it matches best, we are just going to assume we have a Smerinthus ophthalmica for now, based on our region. There is currently no widely used common name for this species yet, but on this website we will just refer to it as the "Ophthalm Sphinx", derived from it's scientific name ophthalmica just as saleceti is called "Salecet Sphinx" and cerisyi is sometimes called "Cerisyi's Sphinx".

- Alan