What is that thing?!
It’s a woolly bear caterpillar!
One of our keen-eyed volunteers spotted this guy at a work party in the West Duwamish about a week ago. Although not the biggest or most beautiful creature you will find in the Greenbelt, it is, to me, one of the most fascinating. But why, you may ask? Doesn’t it just turn into a moth? Well yes, it does turn into a moth, but it does some other really cool stuff as well. Here are some things you might not have known about woolly bears:
- Recent research on woolly bears has found that they eat alkaloid-laden leaves. Alkaloids are sort of like a “drug”–some ones that might be familiar to us are cocaine, morphine, and caffeine. But these leaves don’t make the caterpillars high–they help them fight off parasitic fly larvae that can otherwise kill them. One researcher called this “the first clear demonstration of self-medication among insects”. (National Geographic News)
- Woolly bear larvae emerge in fall and spend the cold winter months in their caterpillar state. They survive the winter weather throughout North American cold climates in an incredibly interesting way–by producing a cryoprotectant in its tissues. Basically, it makes its own anti-freeze! I bet you wish you could do that. (Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center)
- There is some common folklore, particularly in the eastern part of North America, that says the stripes on woolly bears are predictors of winter weather. If you see a woolly bear and it has a thick orange stripe and relatively thin black stripes, winter should be mild; if the orange stripe is thin and the black stripes are thick, winter will be severe. Judging from our woolly bear that we saw in the Greenbelt, I think we should be in for a pretty easy winter! (Wikipedia)
It’s amazing what interesting adaptations such a small insect can have!
