Hyles tithymali phaelipae - 1st stadium Caterpillars

Okay, so there it is ... in honour of Moth Week 2020 ... a backlog of many, MANY, images that I've been wanting to work through, select and upload "forever" now, but never came around to sorting. I've now mostly given up on the sorting bit and decided to "punish" Ferdy for always saying that I shouldn't limit the amount of images ;o)

But for good reason. This is a rare endemic subspecies that we were lucky to find caterpillars of, two years in a row, quite close enough to the holiday compound near Los Llanos de Ariadne (La Palma, Canary Islands) that we visited in 2019 and 2020, which enabled us to follow through on much of the development.

The first year we found a mix of very young and medium sized caterpillars and couldn't get our head around them at first as it turns out that the caterpillars are HUGELY VARIABLE between instars and even between begin and end of the same stadium. So, little wonder that at the time we couldn't find a visual match for "our" caterpillars. There is only a very limited number of images of the caterpillars of this subspecies around on the internet for comparison and those are mostly "mature" caterpillars.

The second year, we've found one batch of very recently hatched babies and even the empty eggs these must have crawled out of just the day before or so.

Incidentally, it is supposedly mostly the difference in the caterpillars that helps delimiting this subspecies from others. So here is an attempt to provide more images for comparison to the pool available on the internet :o)

Please note two things:
1) Below you will find a a mix of images from the two years and frankly, especially the first year, we've followed different stages intermixed, so we have NO WAY OF TELLING THE EXACT STADIUM. I will _try_ to list them in an order that seems plausible to me, but I may well be putting some in the WRONG ORDER(!)
2) Jeanette kindly made a few images available to complete this series a bit more. Her images are licensed CC-BY-SA as opposed to my usual license of a CC0 Public Domain dedication. I will indicate this best as I can, so please honour the license where applicable.

First stadium caterpillars as found in 2020 (note the partial egg shell in center):

Empty egg shells found nearby:

Early first stadium on toothpick for size (2019)

Early 1st std. full-o-sh*t

First stadium about halfway through - getting lighter/greener:

First stadium toward end - quite pale now:

Not sure?! End of 1st or very early 2nd stadium?! Photo CC-BY-SA Jeanette Essink:

From here on I begin to loose track of development stages, so the order might be off!

These should be late 2nd or maybe 3rd stadium (16mm in length) showing some variability:

2nd/3rd std. 8 days after first image of fairly fresh L1 above (CC-BY-SA Jeanette Essink):

As I suspect to be "finding the limits of the system" (space in description) soon enough, I'll be continuing the series with this image: