Functional Fashion From An Artist And A Caterpillar

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, this is Flora Lichtman, and you’re listening to Science Friday. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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.

DAN RUBINOFF: Most of the time, especially if you work on insects, not only is it not of interest to people, it is of active disinterest.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Look, you found your people– we’re here, this program.

DAN RUBINOFF: Yeah, exactly.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: 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 Manoa who studies the evolution, ecology and conservation of insects. Dan, welcome to Science Friday.

DAN RUBINOFF: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dan, this caterpillar is really putting the freak into freak of nature, I feel like.

DAN RUBINOFF: [LAUGHS] I respectfully disagree.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How?

DAN RUBINOFF: It’s got a hardscrabble 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 Smaug’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 shed spider integument 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 free reign to roam around under and around the spider’s web without getting eaten.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so the spider whose web they’re living in is their predator?

DAN RUBINOFF: So caterpillars are tasty. Let’s just get that out of the way. They are 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hmm.

DAN RUBINOFF: So to say the spiders are predators of these caterpillars is true, but so is every Tom, Dick, and Harry predator on the planet. There’s very few that would refuse a juicy caterpillar.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, they’re like the pig in the blanket of–

DAN RUBINOFF: Yeah!

FLORA LICHTMAN: –the insect world.

DAN RUBINOFF: Yeah. Except the blanket is silk, but yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, so describe what it looks like, this caterpillar.

DAN RUBINOFF: 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wait, its scientific name is “fancy case caterpillars?”

DAN RUBINOFF: No, that’s our fun name for it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK.

DAN RUBINOFF: The scientific name for it is hyposmocoma, but that doesn’t really roll off the tongue. And so we realized that all these birds have cool common names– yellow-bellied sapsucker is very evocative. So why can’t these insects also have a little bit of charm?

And so 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 case 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I love it.

DAN RUBINOFF: There’s 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 Waianae 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow.

DAN RUBINOFF: And that’s probably due to extinction. So this bone collector caterpillar is the last of its kind. 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?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, I’m glad you found this one. And tell us the story. How did you find it?

DAN RUBINOFF: I can definitely give you the first experience we had. We were in the Waianae mountains, walking along a trail. And we’re doing our usual thing, looking on tree bark for hyposmocoma.

One of my grad students starts looking in the tree hole underneath. He’s looking at something, and he shows me. And it looks like a little tiny bag, a capsule almost, the size of maybe a Tylenol gel capsule. But imagine it’s white, and then covered, peppered 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 hyposmocoma 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, and we weren’t even sure there was a caterpillar in there. We thought maybe it was something else. I mean, really, God knows.

But we pick it up, and a little caterpillar peeks its head out. We were surprised. Take that back, and we’re rearing it out. And we’re not even sure it’s part of the hyposmocoma group.

But sure enough, it grows through, and 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, 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 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 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Does this caterpillar turn into some kind of beautiful butterfly? Does it leave this dark chapter of collecting body parts behind?

DAN RUBINOFF: I feel like it’s more of a hardscrabble life than a creepy collector, just personally. If you think about it, it’d be like if Hannibal Lecter lived at a morgue and his job was to clean up. Yeah, nobody would say, oh, that’s really creepy. They’d be like, oh, you’re doing a nice job.

FLORA LICHTMAN: They are eating those bits of dead bugs.

DAN RUBINOFF: Yeah, I guess there’s that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Right?

DAN RUBINOFF: That’s fair.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, OK.

DAN RUBINOFF: I do have a bias, I recognize it. So yes, they do turn into lovely, tiny moths. I think some people would say it’s a little brown moth, 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. One of them, the species named for it is hyposmocoma elegantula. That’s how elegant that person thought that tiny little moth was.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Finding a species like this, where is this on the bucket list for an entomologist?

DAN RUBINOFF: Respectfully, we all have such different bucket lists.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I guess I mean for you. We don’t have to generalize.

DAN RUBINOFF: 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 would 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I mean, I love this story, because I love all extreme evolution stories, like organisms doing things we’d never thought of. But why do you care about this caterpillar?

DAN RUBINOFF: I think it gives us a look under the hood on how evolution functions. And obviously, caterpillars and spiders occur together across the planet, but only here has this 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I think that’s the perfect place to leave it.

DAN RUBINOFF: Thank you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: 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.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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 encounter 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.

LAURA DEVENDORF: Thanks for having me. This is lovely.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Where did this idea come from that textiles might be a way to remember?

LAURA DEVENDORF: 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 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 relive it through a different lens.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I love that idea. You made a quilt that registered touch, is that right?

LAURA DEVENDORF: Not a quilt, technically, because the textile people will know.

[LAUGHTER]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thank you. Please correct me.

LAURA DEVENDORF: It is a handwoven textile. So it’s designed using a software I’ve actually built, and it communicates with a digital Jacquard loom. And I wove it by hand with all the circuitry integrated at the time of weaving.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And what do the sensors do?

LAURA DEVENDORF: 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 back out when you stop pressing. So each one of those pads actually measures where and how hard somebody presses it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I love this idea that, I’ll be colloquial, that the blankets around us are registering our touches.

LAURA DEVENDORF: Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And you haven’t done just tapestries, right? Tell me about this motherhood dress you made.

LAURA DEVENDORF: I started really thinking about garments and what they might remember. And 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.

My younger daughter at the time was two or three, and was just so intensely physical. She would need to have her hand on my neck at almost all times. And it feels a little bit like suffocating. But you know you’re going to miss it, so how do you hold on to it?

The concept was that I wanted to put these four sensors all over my body. And in order to determine where I held my daughter, 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 four 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, OK, 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 four 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Does it feel warm?

LAURA DEVENDORF: It does feel warm.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Does it feel like a proxy for the experience of getting a squeeze?

LAURA DEVENDORF: So 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.

[LAUGHTER]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, OK. So these pieces, they’re art pieces, and they make us think about fabrics differently. But do you think that there’s a future where we all might be wearing electronic textiles?

LAURA DEVENDORF: 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 measures you and gives feedback. So we’ll definitely see e-textiles in medical settings for telemetry and things like that. But in terms of everyday e-textiles, I think it’s going to be something that’s maybe a little bit more soothing than our technology is now.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I like that optimistic future you’re painting.

LAURA DEVENDORF: I’m hoping to manifest it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah. 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?

LAURA DEVENDORF: Oh, I really want to make a little machine that knits and unknits your dress every day, so every day it becomes its new manifestation. 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thank you, Laura.

LAURA DEVENDORF: Thank you so much, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: 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 sciencefriday.com/shrouds.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And that is about all we have time for. Lots of folks helped make this show happen, including–

SANDY ROBERTS: Sandy Roberts.

ROBIN KAZMIER: Robin Kazmier.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Charles Bergquist.

GEORGE HARPER: George Harper.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’m Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.

Copyright © 2025 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/