Caterpillar love story

An adorable animation from Minuscule:

While this is cute, I of course have a few issues with it.

1) Anatomy. I do appreciate the attempt to separate the six true legs and the prolegs, but there are too many prolegs for an inch worm caterpillar. Though they were separated to get the inching motion, which is good. I can forgive the eyes for dramatic effect, though there are supposed to be more (up to 6 on each side).

2) They are sexually immature. Caterpillars do not find love – adult butterflies and moths do. Caterpillars are simply the eating-machine stage, utterly uninterested in a mate until after pupation. They have developing gonads, but they are non-functional.

3) Wrong “worm” in the apple. Inch worms are in the family Geometridae (and a few in Noctuidae), and they do NOT eat apples. It’s the codling moth caterpillar (Cydia pomonella), in the family Tortricidae, that is the typical “worm” that burrows into apples.

As I bet you can guess, I’m really terrible to watch movies with.

Posted on October 3, 2011, in Geometridae, Invertebrates, Lepidoptera. Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.

  1. Yeah dude; number 2 sort of warped it for me.

  2. HA! You have only confirmed my suspicion that entomologists take the fun out of everything.

  3. Ça me rrussae de ne pas avoir à déménager cette année, car on en parle de plus en plus et ça m’inquiète. Par contre, la fiche d’information sur la punaise m’a fourni beaucoup d’information sur cet insecte.Merci

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Ryerson Lab

Functional Morphology, Sensory Biology, Behavior, Biomechanics

I spell it nature

Trying to make sense of the world through science and language.

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