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JABrilliant blue slug caterpillar cocooning 🌊
This hardworking blob is the caterpillar of Packard’s white slug moth, Alarodia slossoniae. Like all slug caterpillars, it’s wonderful, it’s weird, and its silk cocoon is hardened by a crystallized calcium excretion - like few slug caterpillars, it’s quite blue.
Watch how meticulously this caterpillar weaves silk around itself to tightly nestle into a perfect orb. About halfway through cocooning, our lovely blue slug excretes a white liquid - calcium oxalate that it had been storing as a waste product in its malpighian tubules (caterpillar kidneys). Using its slug foot like a paintbrush, the caterpillar swirls this liquid calcium around, rapidly crystallizing its soft silk cocoon into a rigid fortress.
The entire cocooning process documented here took about six hours, so as you might imagine, this footage is sped up quite dramatically. I’ll share the adorable fuzzy white moth that emerges… once it emerges 😉
#slugcaterpillar #cocoon #limacodidae
@jackthropod
