“ Nothing in life is to be dread , it is only to be realise . ” So said Marie Curie , a vivid scientist who had clearly never heard of the horrifying Hawaiian caterpillars that dine on living flesh . Here , we explore how development follow to play this cruel joke on us all .
This , good reader , is a carnivorous cat . It is one of the more than 20 species belong to to the genusEupethecia believed to reside exclusively on the Hawaiian island . As you may have already gathered from the GIF up top , members of this insular clade tend to feature some rather scary - expect outgrowth :
Now , scary - looking body part , in and of themselves , are n’t especially rarified among caterpillars . But unlike , say , the poisonous bristle ofthe nettle caterpillarDarna pallivitta , or the don’t - eat - me - or - you’ll - regret - it colour ofForbestra olivencia larvae , which are predominantly inactive forms ofpredator - deterrence , the pincers on Hawaii ’s caterpillars dish a decidedly active purpose , viz . ensnaring unsuspicious prey . They also play a vice - alike office once the caterpillar has acquired its dupe ; unwilling meals , after all , tend to wriggle .
That these caterpillar make active use of their scary - bits calls care to their transition from a fair game - specie to a predatory one . And , in fact , the conversion to carnivorousnessappears to have been a very successful evolutionary path for Hawaiian member ofEupithecia ; of all the species identified on the archipelago , only two of them are herbivorous . The rest transmit out their murderous larval lives making meal of everything from flies and moths to cricket and roach . They ’ve even been screw to raven on other caterpillar .
The carnivorous caterpillar ’s predatory technique is rather square . First , the larva fasten itself inconspicuously along a leaf or twig , using its rear set of appendage . When an unsuspecting meal treads across its posterior , the caterpillar outpouring forth , kidnap its prey , and evanesces the futilely twitch torso to the other side of its prefer rod ( above ) ; or , instead , lather its trophy right into the gentle wind , with the gleeful briskness of a tike who ’s just grabbed clutch of something she ’s in all likelihood not reckon to ( below ) .
Most of Hawaii ’s carnivorous caterpillar capture quarry via this hairsbreadth - trigger mechanics , a rare elision being Hyposmocoma molluscivora , a species – belonging , you ’ll notice , not to the genus Eupithecia , butHyposmocoma – firstreported by University of Hawaii entomologist Daniel Rubinoff in 2005 , that weaves spider - like webs to captivate and restrain snails . ( Like fellow member of Eupithecia , H. molluscivorae use up their prey while it ’s live . )
It comport mentioning that the meat - eating caterpillars of Hawaii are not omnivore . They’recarnivores through - and - through . To quote Rubinoff , these caterpillars “ would n’t sample foliage if they were starving . ” How or why they first set out on this evolutionary course is ill-defined , but researchers concord the caterpillars ’ way was almost certainly cleared by the isolation provided by Hawaii ’s islands .
Since Darwin ’s image - shifting watching on the Galapagos , scientists have recognise islands as hotbeds of evolutionary activity . ungoverned bynatural predatorsand enabled by vacant bionomic niches , sport can spread quickly and more easily across such obscure ecosystem . It ’s why island populations oftenlook so unlike , and develop so much faster , than their most tight related to mainland counterparts . As Rubinoff so eloquently put it in his 2005 report : “ Hawaii ’s closing off and consequently disharmonic biology in all probability promote evolutionary experimentation that occur nowhere else . ”
BiologyEvolutionScienceZoology
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