Lujan Eroles, 46, of the Argentine town of Santa Fe, said she began screaming as soon as she saw the strange creature. The neighbors came running to see what had occurred. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.” It appeared to be a snake, but his eyes were odd. “I was worried it was poisonous,” she explained.

The creature Eroles captured is the color of a snake, yet it is just 10 cm long. The initial guesses about his species surfaced after she shared the video below on the Internet. As a result, it would be a caterpillar of a Central American moth. To keep predators at bay, the caterpillar imitates the look of a snake because it lacks defensive weapons: