Nicknamed the “bone collector,” this new caterpillar in Hawaii has been confirmed to be secretly scrounging off a spider landlord by covering itself with dead insect body parts. Not really sure why this matters, but caterpillars are known for their fuzziness and occasional weird behavior. Some vibrate aggressively to scare predators, while others create their own antifreeze to survive the cold. But a newly identified member of the offbeat caterpillar club might be the weirdest of all. Nicknamed the “bone collector,” it builds a disguise from insect cadavers it scrounges from a spider web, covering its body with these spider-meal leftovers—and occasionally engaging in cannibalism.
Researchers took almost 17 years to convince themselves that this behavior was not some kind of anomaly among a couple of individuals. After meticulous observations and fieldwork, they finally confirmed that bone collector caterpillars, with all their macabre eccentricity, are the larvae of a new species native to the Hawaiian island of Oahu. The finding was published on Thursday in Science. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like this whole bone collecting thing is kind of creepy.
“I just couldn’t believe it. The first couple of times you find that, you think it’s got to be a one-off—it’s got to be a mistake,” says the study’s lead author Daniel Rubinoff, an entomologist at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. “I’ve been looking at it for over a decade, and it still blows my mind.” How exactly did these caterpillars take on this hardcore habit? The answer is probably evolutionary, Rubinoff says.
