Living Lies

I see you. Heat. Heat. Most of the boughs are bare and the last leaves are for caterpillars that hope to live through the winter find there is nowhere on the boughs to hide. So they protect themselves by camouflage. The caterpillar of the magpie mouth is so brightly colored that birds will not touch it. Anything so brilliant looks like poison. This caterpillar has cousins on the bare boughs of the oak tree. Here, the caterpillars of the oak beauty marks protect themselves from hungry birds by pretending to be twigs. And on the ivy bush there are other living twigs, the swallow tail mock caterpillars. They hold onto the bow with two pairs of hind feet and keep their bodies stiff and straight. As caterpillars have no backbones, this is rather a fine feat of muscular strength. There is more camouflage to be found on the seashore in winter down on the east coast of England. Here on the marshes are bushes of dead wormwood. These bushes are covered with what look like little bundles of dead foliage. But these bundles are really caterpillars hiding through the cold weather. They belong to the same family as the caterpillars that disguise themselves as twigs. When the weather gets warmer, the caterpillars wake up and go in search of food. Soon, the caterpillar has eaten so much that it becomes too big for its old skin and has to climb out. It immediately sets about making itself a new disguise. Down each side of its body are small humps. The caterpillar bites off pieces of leaf and fastens them onto the humps by spinning a few strands of silk. That's on safely. And the next piece is bitten off. The spring sunshine that wakes the caterpillars on the seashore is shining on the hedros inland and waking other caterpillars in the eggs of the early thorn moth which are beginning to hatch These caterpillars belong to the same species as all the others you've seen. And you can now understand why all the caterpillars of this group are called loopers. They get along by making themselves into loops and straightening themselves out again. If a looper caterpillar feels very adventurous, it spins a silk thread on which it lets itself down. It's easy going down. down. Glor down. All this moving about in search of food is done at night when movement will not attract the attention of hungry birds. In the daytime, the caterpillars give an excellent imitation of twigs and so escape notice. After some time of disguising and feeding, the caterpillar fastens the edges of a leaf together with silk. And in this hiding place turns into a puper, apparently quite lifeless. But after a few weeks, there's movement inside the leaf, and the creature that has been in turn an egg, a looper caterpillar, and a puper now appears in its final stage as a moth. Heat. Heat. The puper case is left empty while its late inhabitant hangs onto a nearby leap and pumps the blood into its wings which have been crumpled up inside the puper case. It takes about a quarter of an hour for the wings to expand. And then, forgetting how as a caterpillar it used to get about by looping, the new early thorn moth prepares to fly.