Extreme Strategies for Survival - the killer moth (caterpillar) 12 comments

31 Mar 2007 @ 09:37, by Max Sandor Last month my better half worked in the garden and all of a sudden started screaming, nearly passing out. A bit overreacting, I thought at first, before locating the source of her excruciating pain: a moth caterpillar, see photo (and see Lonomia in wikipedia). A few people are killed everyday in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo by this cute little bugger but strangely there are no good pictures of how it actually looks like. This moth caterpillar is not straight from Mothvana land, hehe, (see Polar Dynamics by Sandor&Dawson if you want to know about Mothvana Land). Still trying to isolate its exact location Orisha (archetype) system. Apparently belonging to the Ossayin class but the colors and other indicators are pointing towards a 'lone rider' Shango type. In any case, it has NO natural enemies that would dare to eat it. Only one rare type of fly manages to leave their eggs in it (how?) and the eggs will eventually eat the caterpillar from the inside. Since this kind of fly is nearly extinct, it can be expected that this killer caterpillar may be even more of a problem in the future... In the language of Tupi, the caterpillar is called Taturana, 'fire hair', sometimes also called Ruga. The only known antidote exists in the Instite of Butanta, away only 30 minutes or so, risking a few radar tickets, oh well, but luckily it wasn't necessary for us to get there. After looking at their webpage... I realized that I should have collected the specimen and send it there... on the upside of it, it prompted me to start uploading videos to youtube.com even though I thought of it too late to make a video of the taturana in our garden (very slow moving anyway)... Speaking of youtube.com, subscribe to my channel mjsandor, to see the latest videos as I upload them, for example, watching my knees hovering over Santos: Another upside of the taturana is the possibility to develop a strong anti-coagulant for fighting thrombose, etc... Ah, I forgot, the moth, once born, lives for 15 days but it never eats anything. It's mouth is therefore degenerated and it looks like a brown leave. Of course, a perfect study of an extreme archetype... Biologists classify the moth as "Lepidoptera; Saturniidae" and we can indeed detect some Saturnian features here... Rests the question why it appeared in my garden... hmmm...

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