“Science fiction has never invented an alien as weird as what actually exists in the insect world,” notes attorney and author Timothy Sandefur. He was discussing how carnivorous “bone collector” caterpillars wear corpses as camouflage. This “caterpillar in Hawaii secretly scrounges off a spider landlord by covering itself with dead insect body parts,” reports Scientific American. “It builds a disguise from insect cadavers it scrounges from a spiderweb, covering its body with these spider-meal leftovers—and occasionally engaging in cannibalism. It took researchers almost 17 years to convince themselves that this behavior was not some kind of anomaly among a couple of individuals. After meticulous observations and fieldwork, they finally confirmed that bone collector caterpillars, with all their macabre eccentricity, are the larvae of a new species that is native to the Hawaiian island of Oahu.”
In other strange news, skin grafts made of fish scales saved a burn victim.
A rare flightless grasshopper was found in Virginia for the first time in 79 Years.
Fish species are rebounding off the coast of California due to their young finding a sanctuary in abandoned oil rigs.
Scientists recently discovered that the world’s coral reefs are more plentiful than previously thought
