{"id":26593,"date":"2025-04-24T18:00:07","date_gmt":"2025-04-24T18:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=26593"},"modified":"2025-04-24T18:23:24","modified_gmt":"2025-04-24T18:23:24","slug":"bone-collector-caterpillars-dont-play-with-their-food-they-wear-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=26593","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Bone Collector\u2019 Caterpillars Don\u2019t Play With Their Food. They Wear It."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Hawaii is a beautiful tropical paradise and also home to formidable creepy crawly predators. There are spiders that impale prey in midair<\/a> and venomous centipedes that can stretch nearly 15 inches long<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And then there are the carnivorous caterpillars, an evolutionary rarity. And now scientists have discovered one very hungry caterpillar that doesn\u2019t just eat other insects \u2014 it decorates itself in the macabre mishmash of the body parts of its meals.<\/p>\n

Nicknamed the bone collector, this caterpillar and its grisly taste in couture are described Thursday in the journal Science<\/a>. \u201cThis behavior was utterly unknown,\u201d said Daniel Rubinoff, an entomologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an author of the study. His team initially compared the caterpillars to crawling crime scenes.<\/p>\n

The bone collector caterpillar is found only within a six-square-mile swath of a single mountain range on the island of Oahu. There it resides exclusively on cobwebs spun by spiders in logs and rock cavities. As the caterpillars skulk about the webs, they scavenge dead and dying insects and other arthropods ensnared in the sticky silk.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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According to David Wagner, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut who was not involved with the new study, the caterpillar\u2019s reliance on spiders presents one of nature\u2019s most improbable connections. \u201cIt is remarkable that a caterpillar would tie its fate to a spider \u2014 a clear and present danger for both caterpillar and moth alike,\u201d Dr. Wagner said. He\u2019s aware of only one other moth species that frequents spider webs. But that species is a vegetarian that snacks on plant material caught in the web.<\/p>\n

Dr. Rubinoff first encountered the bone collector caterpillar in 2008 when he examined a web inside a tree hollow. The caterpillars are incredibly rare. More than 150 field surveys in the area have yielded only 62 bone collector specimens.<\/p>\n

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Hawaii is a beautiful tropical paradise and also home to formidable creepy crawly predators. There are spiders that impale prey in midair and venomous centipedes that can stretch nearly 15 inches long.And then there are the carnivorous caterpillars, an evolutionary rarity. And now scientists have discovered one very hungry caterpillar that doesn\u2019t just eat other insects \u2014 it decorates itself in the macabre mishmash of the body parts of its meals.Nicknamed the bone collector, this caterpillar and its grisly taste in couture are described Thursday in the journal Science. \u201cThis behavior was utterly unknown,\u201d said Daniel Rubinoff, an entomologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an author of the study. His team initially compared the caterpillars to crawling crime scenes.The bone collector caterpillar is found only within a six-square-mile swath of a single mountain range on the island of Oahu. There it resides exclusively on cobwebs spun by spiders in logs and rock cavities. As the caterpillars skulk about the webs, they scavenge dead and dying insects and other arthropods ensnared in the sticky silk.According to David Wagner, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut who was not involved with the new study, the caterpillar\u2019s reliance on spiders presents one of nature\u2019s most improbable connections. \u201cIt is remarkable that a caterpillar would tie its fate to a spider \u2014 a clear and present danger for both caterpillar and moth alike,\u201d Dr. Wagner said. He\u2019s aware of only one other moth species that frequents spider webs. But that species is a vegetarian that snacks on plant material caught in the web.Dr. Rubinoff first encountered the bone collector caterpillar in 2008 when he examined a web inside a tree hollow. The caterpillars are incredibly rare. More than 150 field surveys in the area have yielded only 62 bone collector specimens.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26595,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26593"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26596,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26593\/revisions\/26596"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}