Hyposmocoma molluscivora (a type of snail) snail-eating caterpillar

Species description or overview

Taxonomy & nomenclature

Images

Snail-feeding Hawaiian caterpillars
Images of snail-feeding caterpillars from Hawaii are presented here.

Distribution

In the news

Caterpillar spins a web to feast on snails
Researchers in Hawaii have discovered a bizarre caterpillar that captures its prey -- usually snails -- in a web much like a spider's. Then the caterpillar feasts on escargot. (All Things Considered, July 22, 2005)

Web-Spinning Caterpillar Stalks Snails
"Moths and butterflies compose one of the most diverse insect orders, but they are overwhelmingly herbivorous. Less than 0.2% are specialized predators, indicating that lepidopteran feeding habits are highly constrained. We report a Hawaiian caterpillar that specializes on snails, a unique food source requiring an unusual feeding strategy. The caterpillar uses silk to restrain live prey. All caterpillars have silk glands, but none are known to use silk in this spiderlike fashion. Considering the canalization of caterpillar diets, evolution to attack and feed on snails is an anomaly. Hawaii s isolation and consequently disharmonic biota likely promote evolutionary experiments that occur nowhere else." (This text is the article's abstract.)

Other resources

Some documents posted on the HEAR website are in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. If your computer is not already set up to read these files, you can download the FREE Adobe Acrobat reader. You can set up most web browsers to automatically invoke this reader (as a "helper application" or "add-in") upon encountering documents of this type (refer to your browser's documentation for how to do this).

The Hawaiian Ecosystems at Risk (HEAR) project is currently funded by the Pacific Basin Information Node (PBIN) of the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) through PIERC (USGS) with support from HCSU (UH-Hilo). More details are available online.

The content of this page is based on information last generated on 29 October 2009 by PT. The template for this page was created on 15 March 2004 by EMS, and was last updated on 20 February 2006 by PT.