Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2015/05/05/tree-worms.html
Some trees near my house are covered in these little fellows, so I shot some footage of them and made them this song.
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Soon you will be able to write a little song for all your dead trees.
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They’re called Tent Caterpillars and I hope somebody is going to burn them out of there, otherwise they’ll be in every tree you can see.
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We always called them tent worms.
My dad would put a sheet under the tree, then attack them with a blowtorch.
Ugh, that jerkily-writhing sheet still gives me nightmares.
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Nice viddie. It’s the muzik that makes it.
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Not being an arborist, I particularly dislike their nasty habit of floating in the air and attaching themselves to passers-by.
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These guys are so cool. They are “presocial”, meaning they do more together than just mate, but they aren’t as social as ants (ants and bees are “eusocial”). This is fairly unusual for caterpillars!
These guys hatch from eggs laid in a mass and will stay together, presumably through chemical cues. They will build a nest, slowly expanding it daily. They don’t eat inside the nest though. They will move from inside the nest to outside of it, still very close together, and then some individuals will “scout” for feeding sites. They will then move en masse to this site, feed, and then return to their nest. These guys have feeding behaviors similar to ants, but they are very unlike ants.
How they communicate these kinds of complex information and coordinate group activities without any centralized control is a very interesting question for entomologists and chemical ecologists.
Would you like to know more?
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I recall when they would reach their peak numbers and the roads would be slick with green guts…
The little buggers would be hanging all over the place.
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If by “cool” you mean “revolting.” I grew up calling them bagworms. I think they need more natural predators, but I’m not volunteering.
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soak the end of a rolled up newspaper in kerosine and light those fuckers up. They’re killing your trees.
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There’s caterpillar poop everywhere!
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They are pests, but not as bad as Gypsy Moth caterpillars, which are different.
But whatever you do, don’t watch this video and then think about how it would feel for them to be crawling under your skin. Just don’t.
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Awesome but I admit I was hoping for some lyrics. Perhaps some spoken word? You do have that, as they say, down.
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Just in case you thought “kill it with fire” was only a metaphor
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I think they eventually got taken down by a baculovirus, which is the sort of thing that happens eventually to any population that overexpands (you all have been warned).
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I wondered why I never saw them marching en masse after the late-70’s/early-80’s – I assumed that the had a longl population boom/bust cycle.
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Cool song song but fuck those little bastards. We had a few cherry trees and the second we saw just a hint of white fluffy tent, we’d spray the ever-living hell out of them. Couldn’t burn, way to close to buildings and were in town.
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The baculoviruses are excellent biocontrol agents, but I’m not sure if they have been used on tent caterpillars intentionally. I seem to recall a story about an accidental release from an early lab.
Some of the early infestations of the tent caterpillars were huge in scale.
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