Aaaand we’re off – to see if some of my caterpillars are chemically protected.

This is my arm right now:

I’m about to go rub some caterpillars on another lab member.
(It’s ok, we’ve filled out the human testing protocol paperwork.)

So far I’m intrigued that these three species have all given me the same type of reaction in terms of timing, appearance, and sensation (it burns, and then itches). Other people in the lab have reacted to them as well, but I want to document this in a systematic fashion. It could be an important phylogenetic character. So far we’re pretty sure two of them are in the same clade, and the other we are going to add to our molecular dataset soon.