It's also been a good long time since I've talked about and dumped photos of a cute interesting animal, so here's one for you: the bagworm moth caterpillar (and adult female moth)!
For once I'm interested in the larval stage and not the moth itself, because photos of the incredible tiny "log cabins" the caterpillars build have been making the rounds on social media recently. It's quaint and whimsical, I promise!
Basically there are shitloads of moths in the family the bagworm moth belongs to, and there is more than one species of "case bearer" (which would make a good song or album title or band name as one word) moth, which in some cases belong to totally different families of shitloads of other moths, and are unrelated. ... Great!
For example, some of the case-builders or -bearers live in cedar and other evergreen trees, hatching and immediately covering themselves up with whatever they can grab and attach with coccoon silk:
(Jim Rathert)
Sneaky evergreen bois, smol berries, very camouflage
Only the adult male moths emerge and move around cabin-less, to find females to breed with. It sounds kind of sad to me that the females never leave their cases, or do so for just long enough to procreate. But then, I guess it's not sad, because look! This one lives in a tiny hat:
c h a r m i n g
I can't lie to you about cuteness in a Cute Shit post, though: these little fuckers are actually pretty ugly under there.
(Nikita Hengbok)
A H H
Sorry about that.
But, onto the best part: the case bearers that chew off lengths of stem and sprig to stack atop themselves, resulting in log cabin-like structures that are sometimes pyramidal, sometimes spiraling, and sometimes both. It ends up looking wooden just because the stems and sprigs dry out and harden.
It's kind of like if a turtle had to build its own shell:
There! See? Not wood. There's a fresh one on the bottom.
Oh, a heckin' upside-down guy
Oof, extreme core strength
(Chien C. Lee)
Aww! Do you perhaps have rustic handcrafted wares for me to purchase, tiny travelling merchant?! Where is the door, where do I knock? Or can you hear me just fine under there?
Aww, oh no! Look at how tiny this heckin' upside-down guy is!
(Fujimoto Koh)
Oh noooo, his twigs are mossy! Stahp!
I think this incredibly quaint, high-resolution image of a mossy spiral "cabin" is the main one floating around right now. It occurred to me that we would also find this instantly adorable because of a particular association: "bagworm" is pretty reminiscent of "Baggins". Both are simple little creatures that spend their lives in comfortable tiny houses and rarely venture out, if ever. Right?! Right. Bilbo Bagworm, Caterpillar. Carpenter. At your service.
Finally, here are some really lovely, compelling images of what is presumably a totally different species of case-bearing moth, in the South Sinai region of Israel!
Oh man, I love it! Prickly desert antisocial - wait, is this me?
Bagworm moths are found throughout the Eastern and Southern United States, too, so if you've ever seen a little cocoon-like clump of dried leaves or other plant detritus, it was probably meant to be a log cabin but didn't turn out as nice!
You can read more about the little buggers here, and they also included a picture of a very cute, soft, furry adult; they don't stay creepy and gross. Weird tiny doggo, but still a good boy. They're all good boys.
Since I'm perpetually in Catch Up Mode and still need to trim, stick together, and upload the videos from last winter onward, and continue with blog posts from the end of this April onward (-muted inward screaming-), here are some of those other cute animal and other nature posts I mentioned, if you're interested:
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