A plastic lid certainly wasn't on this bear's list of bare necessities. Biologists were thankfully able to safely remove the ...

Ever bitten into your food and found something that shouldn’t be there? Some people have discovered truly horrifying ...

Entomologist Dr. Jessica Ware joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about the world of insects. Are cockroaches so resilient that they'd survive a nuclear war? Why do praying ...

A newly described species from Hawaiʻi hides itself with carcasses to avoid getting eaten by spiders. Newly described bone collector caterpillars build a silken case around their bodies and adorn ...

These six bone collector caterpillar specimens adorned their cases with beetle wings, ant heads, fly wings and legs, spider legs and other insect body parts. Their cases—the gray material seen t ...

Scientists in Hawaii have discovered a rare carnivorous caterpillar that hunts trapped insects and camouflages itself with their body parts. Only 62 have been seen in 20 years of research. Listen to ...

The odd insect is only found on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. It creeps along spiderwebs, feeding on trapped insects and decorating its silk case with their body parts. Nature’s macabre disguise ...

Six specimens of a newly identified carnivorous caterpillar species nicknamed the “bone collector,” which camouflages itself by wearing body parts of its prey, are seen in this handout image ...

The caterpillars noticeably only chose the body parts of other insects, or shed spider skin ... In captivity, the caterpillars would eat any live, slow-moving, or immobilized insect prey. Anything was ...

Believed to be part of a 5-million-year-old lineage, this caterpillar feeds opportunistically on dead or weakened insects, often those cached by the spider hosts in whose webs it resides.

A severed ant head. A fly wing. A beetle abdomen. These body parts ripped from devoured insects festoon a newfound caterpillar’s protective coat. Dubbed the “bone collector,” this ...

This Hawaiian caterpillar raids spiderwebs camouflaged in insect prey’s body parts, and it's not above cannibalism in a pinch. Credit: Rubinoff lab/University of Hawaii, Manoa. We think of moths ...