In the mountains of Oʻahu, there exists a tiny caterpillar far cooler than you will ever be. To it, your wildest Mad Max fantasies are just another Tuesday. It’s carnivorous. It lives in spider webs. Scientists have dubbed it the “bone collector,” and for good reason — the creepy caterpillar wears a custom wardrobe made of dismembered insect corpses.
It’s a Hyposmocoma, a genus of Hawaiian moths famous for making portable silk cases that look like cigars or candy wrappers. But the bone collector went fully hardcore. Instead of sticks or algae, it sews its silk sheath with legs, heads, and assorted bug chunks looted from spider webs.
Discovered in 2008 and officially detailed in Science this year, the bone collector lurks exclusively in a six-square-mile patch of the Waiʻanae mountain range. It scavenges the corpses of insects trapped in webs spun by nonnative spiders, somehow avoiding the very predators who should be eating to cull its numbers before it decides it wants to upgrade to human limbs. Scientists think the thing wears dead things as a form of camouflage, making it look like just another piece of forest debris.
The bone collector is a certified corpse defiler through and through. In a laboratory setting, researchers found that it ignored other pieces of random junk and instead went straight for freshly dead things when it came time to assemble its macabre outfit. If a piece doesn’t fit, it’ll choose through it until it does. If it doesn’t think a piece of another bug’s dead body doesn’t match the rest of its ensemble, it simply will not wear it. It knows what it likes, especially dietarily, as its own kind is one of its favorite meals.
Yes, it is also a cannibal. Not exclusively, though. It will eat a variety of other bugs. It just doesn’t discriminate when it comes to its brethren. That might help explain why this little psycho is endangered. Only 62 have ever been found, and scientists theorize that it is teetering on the edge of extinction. And that’s unfortunate. Or maybe extremely fortunate, depending on how creeped out you are by its mere existence.
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