In the light of the moon glimmering over just six square miles of a mountain range on O‘ahu, a little egg waited to hatch.
One Sunday morning the sun rose over the mountains and—pop!—out of the egg came a tiny and very grisly caterpillar.
For now, the caterpillar looked as innocent as any other larva. But unlike 99.87 percent of the nearly 200,000 species of moths and butterflies that eat leaves, this caterpillar was carnivorous, meaning the only thing he hungered for was flesh.
He started to look (hunt) for some food (flesh).
This kind of caterpillar’s favorite and only place to hunt is on spiderwebs woven in tree hollows, logs, and rock cavities. There, the caterpillar crawls around in search of any insects caught in the web. The spider does not notice the caterpillar, it seems, because of its disguise.
You see, while the caterpillar hungered for flesh, he also enjoyed decorating his body with the dismembered remains of his prey.
This is why the researchers who described this caterpillar in the journal Science have dubbed him the “bone collector.” As Daniel Rubinoff, an entomologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an author on the paper, told the Washington Post, “If there’s a bit of dried ant brain left in an ant shell, they’ll eat that before they sew it onto their back.”
On Monday, he chewed through the body of an entangled ant. He placed the head of the ant on the silken case he wore on his body and lugged around everywhere he went, like the shell of a hermit crab. But he was still hungry.
He started to hunt for some flesh.
On Tuesday, he ate through two flies, delicately gluing their hairy legs to his body. He was a careful curator, inspecting and rotating the remains of his victims and occasionally shaving them to fit to his form. But he was still hungry.
He started to hunt for some flesh.
On Wednesday, he ate through three flies, this time weaving their lacy wings to his body, along with some shed spider skins discarded in the web. But he was still hungry.
He started to hunt for some flesh.
On Thursday, he ate through four earwigs, sticking their pincer-tipped abdomens atop his increasingly armored figure. But he was still hungry.
He started to hunt for some flesh.
On Friday, he ate through five weevils, stuffing their elegantly snouted heads into the clutter of his body case. But he was still hungry.
On Saturday he ate through one black blister beetle, one darkling beetle, one earwig, one blow fly, one dog dung fly, another earwig, one acorn weevil, and one weevil of indeterminate species.
But he was still hungry. He wandered around his spiderweb home until he saw another ghoulish mass—a crawling lump of spider legs, fly wings, earwig abdomens, ant heads, and weevil legs. It was another bone collector caterpillar!
There was no other choice but a duel to the death. Mano a mano. Larva a larva. Two babies cloaked in the refuse of the lives they had taken, not for sport but out of need. The caterpillars inched toward each other until, there—teetering on the edge, the point of no return, the taking of a life so similar to their own, perhaps even a long-lost brother or sister? No, no! Push the thought out of his mind. The only blood here is for drinking, sipped slowly from the soft body of another caterpillar soon to join the husk of death that encases it—the work of his short life now the container of his death.
That night he had a stomachache!
The next day was Sunday again. The caterpillar ate a fresh-looking green beetle—very healthful—and after that he felt cleansed.
Now he wasn’t hungry any more — and he wasn’t a little caterpillar anymore. He was a big, fat caterpillar who was also adorned in the corpses of the dead and dying insects whose flesh gave him life and purpose, and whose earthly remains had become eerily reanimated in some sick evolutionary game.
He built a small house, called a cocoon, around himself. He stayed inside for a long, still time. Then he nibbled a hole in the cocoon, pushed his way out and…
he was a small and somewhat underwhelming moth!
