AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Now to some caterpillar news. OK, Juana, you remember Eric Carle's "Very Hungry Caterpillar," right?
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
I mean, how can I forget? I think he eats one apple on Monday. Is it two pears on Tuesday?
CHANG: That's right. That's the one. OK, so caterpillars - which are the larvae of moths and butterflies - they're usually total vegetarians, right? But entomologist Daniel Rubinoff of the University of Hawaii, Manoa, he would like you to meet the hungry caterpillar's carnivorous cousin.
DANIEL RUBINOFF: This bone collector stands alone. It is a lone wolf.
SUMMERS: Bone collectors eat other bugs, and if that wasn't punk enough for you, their name comes from what they do to bug corpses.
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR, RUBINOFF LAB, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII: They take bits of other animals and tie it to their own shelter and crawl around flaunting it. It's a little bit "Mad Max," honestly.
CHANG: A little bit gross, but these caterpillars are a new discovery published last week in the journal Science. When Rubinoff first saw one, he was hunting for caterpillars in Hawaii's Waianae Mountains.
SUMMERS: He and his grad student decided to stick their heads in a tree hole. They do this a lot. First thing they see are cobwebs - lots of them. They brush those out of their hair, and then...
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR, RUBINOFF LAB, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII: We see this little bag of bug bits in this little tree hole, and we look at each other and then he picks it up. And I thought maybe a spider had spun it, but it was covered in bug bits, which seemed odd. And then a little caterpillar peeks its head out of one side, and it's like, oh, my God.
CHANG: The caterpillar was in with the bug bits.
SUMMERS: But the - oh, my God - was not because the caterpillar was in something. Rubinoff actually studies a rare group of caterpillars that make silk cases to live in, kind of like a snail shell.
CHANG: He calls them Hawaiian fancy case caterpillars, and he's got lots of fun names for the cases.
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR, RUBINOFF LAB, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII: Like, burrito, candy wrapper, cigar, oyster - I could go on.
CHANG: Usually, they look like bark or lichen, but back in that tree hole, the bug bits? That was new. Under the microscope, they could see a movable massacre.
SUMMERS: Now, if you've got your favorite bug listening, maybe let them fly outside for a minute.
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR, RUBINOFF LAB, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII: I'm looking at half of a crunchy beetle wing, the thorax of a different beetle. You know, there's another one here which has got a whole weevil head - fang sheaths, a good sprinkling of spider shed legs, an ant head.
SUMMERS: So once they knew what to look for, they found more bone collectors in the forest. Then it clicked.
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR, RUBINOFF LAB, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII: We started thinking, hey, actually, there's always a spider web around these guys.
CHANG: Always a spider - they discovered the bone collectors were eating these spider leftovers. And the whole wearing dead bugs thing? Well, that was to fool the spider.
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR, RUBINOFF LAB, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII: The spider doesn't know that these caterpillars are there. If they did, they would eat them immediately. It thinks - when it feels a vibration and it runs up to these bone collector cases - it's tasting and feeling itself in the form of its shed skins, and then last week's meal. So it's looking at dirty laundry and detritus.
SUMMERS: Rubinoff says it's a marvel of evolution, and when their "Mad Max" days are over, they turn into little white moths.
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR, RUBINOFF LAB, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII: You're the size of a grain of rice and a half. If you're afraid of going hiking in Hawaii because of these things, fear not.
CHANG: Even for moths, punk can just be a phase.
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