Between my house and the neighbor's house there is a huge weed.  It's almost next to our front door.  It's about a meter tall with huge leaves about the size of dinner plates.  We haven't pulled it because it's on the neighbor's side (although the space between our houses is only about 50 centimeters) but we don't know our neighbors that well.  I'd like to pull it, but my husband says he wouldn't like people messing on his property, so we shouldn't either.  Fair enough.  He also says he doesn't want the neighbors to assume he will do their work for them.  This is the part where I roll my eyes.

Yesterday we came home and noticed that the weed's leaves had almost disappeared.  Suddenly.  One day it was a leafy monstrosity and the next it was pretty much the green skeleton of a monstrosity.  I looked at my husband to ask if he did it and he simply shook his head. We shrugged, figured the neighbors had got some weird weed killer and went inside and had lunch.

When we came back from the Matsuri that evening, the weed was even more skeletal.  Hitoshi took a closer look and even though it was dark, saw a huge catepillar.  The thing is easily 6 cm long.  So now we knew why the plant looked dead.  The neighbors got a weed killer they didn't even know about!

I took some pics last night and today then checked on the internet to see what kind of caterpillar is was. I'm a little disappointed that this juicy green critter is not going to grow into a beautiful butterfly.  It's just going to become a huge brown moth.

I took this one this morning.  I put some paper behind it to get rid of background.

  This is what it will look like as an adult. (pic is from wikidpedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manduca_sexta)

And just because it is interesting, I will add this YouTube video: