Scientists in Hawaii have recently discovered a new caterpillar with a creepy sense of fashion. The Bone Collector lives in spider webs and decorates itself with the body parts of the spider’s prey, such as fly wings, earwig abdomens, or weevil and ant heads.
It is a carnivorous opportunist, feeding on insects caught in the web. Few caterpillars eat meat - about 300 varieties out of 200,000. I wonder what the spider makes of its missing meals and this peculiar mobile trash heap.
The bone collector carefully selects is macabre accoutrement, nibbling larger pieces down to size before weaving them onto its silken case, masking its scent and texture from the spider. Eventually, the case becomes the cocoon for the Hyposmocoma moth. The moths lay their eggs in the spiderweb’s nooks and crannies, and the cycle begins again. The newly hatched caterpillar pulls the random bits of the spider’s discarded dinners onto its body to camouflage itself from the landlord.
The bone collector has only been found in a small 15-square-kilometer area of forest in the Wai’anae mountain range on Oahu. They live near spiders who weave their webs in a tree, log, or rock cavity. Entomologist Dan Rubinoff and his colleagues kept seeing this weird caterpillar covered in bits of bugs next to a spider web. It took them seventeen years to convince themselves that the caterpillar’s habit of dressing in corpses wasn’t an anomaly of a few flamboyant individuals.
These little crawlers are not considered symbiotic with spiders. They just grab what’s available and either eat it or wear it. They are also cannibalistic, which is why you’ll typically only see one bone collector per web.
Freaky indeed!
Fascinating. I love nature.