Science Friday - Functional Fashion From An Artist And A Caterpillar

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

A passion for fashion among the “bone collector caterpillar,” who wears a coat of body parts, and an artist who makes fabrics that remember.We inch into the world of extreme outerwear with the newly-discovered “bone collector caterpillar,” which wears a coat of many co…llected body parts. Why, Hanipillar Lecter? Entomologist Dan Rubinoff, who along with his team found the species on a mountainside in Oahu, Hawaii, shares the juicy details. And, what if clothes could remember our experiences? Computer programmer and artist Laura Devendorf is making textiles embedded with sensors and other tech that can tell us about our lives. One dress she made recorded her physical interactions with her kids—and played them back. Laura joins Host Flora Lichtman and spins a yarn about the future of e-textiles. Transcript will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, this is Flor Lichten, and you're listening to Science Friday. On today's show, extreme outerwear from electronic programmable textiles to a caterpillar that spins a coat of many collected body parts. I promise you'll want to hear about it. Most of the time, especially if you work on insects, not only is it not of interest to people, it is of active disinterest. Look, you found your people. We're here. This program. Yeah, exactly. On the island of Oahu in the mountains, entomologists found a brand new species of caterpillar that is unusual in so many ways. First of all, it lives in a spider web and scavenges the entangled insects.

To be a carnivorous caterpillar is already pretty strange, about 0.1% of all caterpillars eat meat. But that's not all. This caterpillar then takes the leftovers and decorates itself. with the body parts of its victims. It's been named the bone collector caterpillar. Here to tell us all the juicy details about caterpillar lector and why it matters is Dan Rubinoff. He's an entomologist at the University of Hawaii at Minoa who studies the evolution, ecology, and conservation of insects. Dan, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Dan, this caterpillar, like, is really putting the freak into freak of nature, I feel like. I respectfully disagree. How? It's got a hard to scrabble life. But the craziest thing about these caterpillars, in my mind, is not just that they're carnivorous, but that they're living with spiders. I mean, they're literally living in smog's lair, stealing treasure from under his nose. And it's a big ask to be a juicy caterpillar living under the eye of a spider that would eat you in a heartbeat. And so that's why they're doing this kind of gross thing is really just to survive. They, meticulously pick up little bits of arthropod, so mites, beetle wings, fly wings, ant heads, whatever it is. They'll eat the little juicy bits that are left out of there, which are probably more like a bit of ant brain jerky. But then they take that head capsule

and they attach it to their silk case that they live inside. And they also will take sort of shed spider intakement and attach that to the case. And the reason, they're doing that is to fool the spider into thinking that they are not edible or interesting. And that allows them sort of free rain to roam around under and around the spider's web without getting eaten. Okay, so the spider whose web they're living in is their predator. So caterpillars are tasty. Let's just get that out of the way. They're tasty and most things like to eat caterpillars. So the spider is perfectly willing to eat them if it can find them. hiding in a case like that makes it hard for the spider to detect this juicy bit inside.

So to say the spiders are predators of these caterpillars is true, but so is every Tom, Dick, and Harry, predator on the planet. You know, there's very few that would refuse a juicy caterpillar. Yeah, they're like the pig in the blanket of the inside of the inside of the room. Yeah, except the blanket is silk, but yeah. Yeah, so describe what it looks like, this caterpillar. Well, one of the first questions that people often ask is, what does the caterpillar look like naked, which is kind of an indecent question in my mind, but they are soft and squishy. They're pale. That goes for the entire group. So these bone collector caterpillars are one of over 400 species in the Hawaiian Fancy Case Caterpillar

group that is endemic, only found in the Hawaiian Islands. Wait, is it called, its scientific name is Fancy Case Caterpillers? No, that. That's our fun name for it. The scientific name for it is hyposmicoma, but that doesn't really roll off the tongue. And so we realize that, you know, all these birds have cool common names, right? Yellow-bellied sap sucker is very evocative. So why can't these insects also have a little bit of charm? And so, yeah, they're Hawaiian fancy case because they're building these silk cases and they're not drab.

So if you can imagine these 400 species, they're spread into about 18 different cases. types. So everybody's assigned to a case type. If you're a burrito case type maker, you make a burrito case. Other ones are making cone cases, bugle cases, crab cases, purse cases. You get the idea. But I love it. Yeah. There is only one of these 400 that is the bone collector caterpillar. And it is the only representative of its lineage. Every single other lineage of case type has multiple species. and that's only in the Hawaiinae Mountains on Oahu. So that's quite unusual even for these Hawaiian fancy case caterpillars to have a group that is defined only by a single species in that lineage. Wow.

And that's probably due to extinction. So this bone collector caterpillar is the last of its kind. And we know that there were other ones in the past. And it's very likely there was a species on Kauai as well, at least, if not distributed down the islands. But it's gone. And there really is an ongoing extinction crisis here. So every time you find something crazy and cool like that, there's a little part of my brain which is wondering, what did we miss? What was here 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 700 years ago, that's equally unimaginable that we just didn't have the fortune to find before it disappeared. Well, I'm glad you found this one. And tell us the story. How did you

find it. Yeah, so I can definitely give you the first experience we had. We were in the Y-Nye Mountains, walking along a trail, and we're doing our usual thing looking on tree bark for hyposmicoman. One of my grad students starts looking in the tree hole underneath, and he's looking at something, and he shows me, and it looks like a bag, a little tiny bag, a capsule almost, like the size of maybe a Tylenol gel capsule. But imagine it's white and then covered in little pepper, basically, in little bits of bug. And you're looking at it and you're thinking, what is that? And even though we've been collecting hyposmicoma for years at that point, it still looked off.

It wasn't the sort of tight case we're used to. The camouflage was not camouflage. It was bug bits. And so we picked it up in a little, we weren't even sure there's a caterpillar in there. We thought maybe it was something else. Like, I mean, really, God knows. But we pick it up and a little caterpillar peeks its head out. And we're surprised, take that back, and we're rearing it out, and we're not even sure it's

part of the hyposmicoma group. But sure, now, if it grows through, we get this moth out, and we're a little bit surprised, but we figure, oh, well, this species happened to find itself in a place where there are lots of bug bits. So by coincidence, it just adorned itself with bug bits. And to be fair, it could be that I'm particularly dense and that these would have been obvious to other people, but we want to be sure when you see something that not only you didn't expect, that you really couldn't have imagined.

You know, there's a lot of hesitancy to say, yeah, that's what it is. You're looking for alternative explanations that jive with things that you've had or seen before. This gets to the sort of way that I think science functions. I think the public often thinks it's a lot of eureka moments in the bathtub where suddenly we figure something out. But really, in a lot of ways, it's like watching a sunrise where it just gets slowly more and more clear what we're actually looking at. And so it took us years to sort of become convinced that these guys were exclusively using bug bits and even longer to figure out that they were exclusively hanging out with spiders. So that's why it took us more than a decade to come out with a paper like this. It's just gradually understanding more and more about it to the point where you really feel like this is what we're seeing.

It's crazy. It's not something anybody would have imagined. It seems like a really questionable life choice if you're a caterpillar, but they are doing it and they're making it work. Does this caterpillar turn into some kind of beautiful butterfly? Like, does it leave this dark chapter of collecting body parts behind? I feel like it's more of a hard scrabble life than a creepy collector, just personally. I mean, if you think about it, it'd be like if Hannibal Lecter lived at a morgue and his job was to clean up. You know, nobody would say, oh, that's really creepy.

They'd be like, oh, you're doing a nice job. They are eating those bits of dead bugs. Yeah, I guess there's that. That's fair. Yeah, okay. So, no, I do have a bias. I recognize it. So, yes, they do turn into lovely tiny moths. I think some people would say, oh, it's a little brown moth. But actually when, and that's because they're tiny, these moths are a little bit bigger than a grain of rice when they pop out. But they are really gorgeous if you look at the color patterns in them. And if you want to talk about the Hawaiian fancy case caterpillars more broadly, there are some truly spectacular, tiny. moths in that group. You know, one of them, the species name for it is hyposomacoma elegantula. That's how elegant that person thought that tiny little moth was. Is finding a species like this, like where is this on the bucket list for an entomologist? You know, respectfully, we all have such different bucket lists.

I guess I mean for you. We don't have to generalize. It's worse than that. This isn't something that really even occurred to me. It wasn't on my bucket list because it wasn't in my realm of thinking that there would be something. I knew there would be neat things when I moved to Hawaii. I knew there'd be neat things to discover. I was excited to see what they would be. But the crazy thing about this place is that evolution has gone off the hook in ways that, again, you wouldn't imagine and that you can't really believe when you see them. I mean, I love this story because I love all sort of extreme evolution. stories like, you know, organisms doing things we'd never thought of. But why do you care about

this caterpillar? I think it gives us a look under the hood on how evolution functions. And, you know, obviously caterpillars and spiders occurred together across the planet. But only here has this sort of peculiar relationship evolved. And it just makes me wonder what else we can learn about life on the planet from examining things here in Hawaii specifically. There are lots of great places to do work, but Hawaii particularly due to that combination of isolation and then all the climate zones we have has been particularly interesting for trying to understand evolution. And I think it's because when life gets here, it has an unprecedented situation. And so it responds in unprecedented ways.

I think that's a perfect place to leave it. Thank you. Dan Rubinoff is an entomologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who studies the evolution, ecology, and conservation of insects. Don't go away because after the break, more strange garments. Human ones this time. We'll talk to a textile designer who's making programmable clothes that might be able to tell us about ourselves.

Up next, more extreme outerwear. How might we think about our own clothes differently? Instead of simple coverings, what if we imagined our garments as record keepers? Witnesses to every sound, every smell, every touch that we encountered during our day. My next guest, a computer scientist and artist, is refashioning clothes with sensors and other tech, so they do just that and more. Dr. Laura Devendorf is an information scientist with the Atlas Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she directs the Unstable Design Lab.

Laura, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. This is lovely. Where did this idea come from that textiles might be a way to remember? Oh, that's an interesting question. I think early on finishing my PhD, I had an opportunity to collaborate on a smart textile product. And it just struck me about, you know, if our garments were sentient in some way and all the things they heard and all the things they saw. how interesting it would be to play that back and to kind of relive it through a different lens. I love that idea. I mean, you made a quilt that registered touch. Is that right?

Not a quilt, technically, because the textile people will know. Thank you, please. Correct me. It is a hand-woven textile. So it's designed using a software I've actually built and it communicates with a digital Jekard loom, and I wove it by hand with all the circuitry integrated at the time of weaving. And what do the sensors do? So each one of those sensors is made from felted stainless steel and wool. And so what happens is when you press it down, the stainless steel fibers in the felt make more contacts and lower the electrical resistance so you can measure it.

And then the wool, being very springy, kind of pops the felt. felt back out when you stop pressing. So each one of those pads actually measures where and how hard somebody presses it. I love this idea that, you know, I'm going to all be colloquial, that like the blankets around us are registering our touches. Yeah, yeah. And you haven't done just tapestries, right? Tell me about this motherhood dress you made. You know, I started really thinking about garments and what they might remember. And I thought, you know, at the time I had two small children and I had started an academic position, which was quite difficult and stressful. And it was a generative idea for me to think about the people who need us and what they expect from us. And I really was thinking about

my younger daughter at the time was, God, two or three and was just so intensely physical. Like she would need to have her hand on my neck at almost all time. And it, you know, it feels a little bit like suffocating, but you know you're going to miss it, right? So you how do you hold on to it? The concept was that I wanted to put these force sensors all over my body. And in order to determine where I held my daughter and I put tape all over the places where I feel like she made the most contact, then I used those tape marks to design where the force sensors would go. And then it registered all the touches across a day, and it stored them on a little memory chip.

So then there was also a playback mode. So I was imagining, okay, let's say 10 years in the future, I want to see what these forces were like. What the data will do is it'll actually play back on all of those force sensors as heat. And if you view it through a thermal camera, you can actually see it as a literal heat map across the surface of the garment. Does it feel warm? It does feel warm. Yeah.

Is it feel like a proxy for the sort of experience of getting a squeeze? So, you know, there's some technical challenges there because it needs quite a lot of power to heat up. So you can wear it,

but you have to be next to an outlet. Okay, so these pieces, they're art pieces, and they make us think about fabrics differently. But do you think that a future where we all might be wearing electronic textiles? I think yes, but maybe not in the way that we think. I think often now when we're thinking of electronic textiles,

we're thinking of phones on your body, gadgets and devices. And I think the future for e-textiles needs to look a little bit different. I think in some ways the garment as a kind of sensor, as a kind of playful surface might be a little bit more interesting and new than necessarily the garment as something that, you know, measures you and gives feedback. So, you know, we'll definitely see e-textiles in medical settings, you know, for telemetry and things like that. But in terms of like everyday e-textiles, I think it's going to be something that's maybe a little bit more soothing than our technology is now. I like that optimistic future your painting. You know,

I'm hoping to manifest it. Yeah. I mean, I think your work prompts us to rethink clothing in a way and what it could be. What do you want us to think when we put on clothes? Oh, I mean, I really want to make a little machine that like knits and unknits your dress every day. So every day it becomes its new manifestation, you know. But I love the art of dressing. You're making choices about how you present yourself in the world and your identity and what you believe in and the groups you associate with and the groups you don't associate with. And so I think there's a real artfulness and a joy in that that I would like to celebrate. Thank you, Laura. Thank you so much, Flora. Dr. Laura Devendorf is an information scientist with the Atlas Institute at the

University of Colorado, Boulder, where she directs the unstable design lab. And you can learn more about Laura's work at Science Friday.com slash shrouds. And that is about all we have time for. Lots of folks helped to make the show happen, including Sandy Roberts, Robin Casmer, Charles Bergquist, George Harper. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.