Carol Pasternak shared this great video of a Luna caterpillar (Actias luna) eclosing to their second or perhaps 3rd instar.
I would love to see iNaturalist incorporate the ability to upload videos and append them to creatures. Sometimes you need to see how an insect moves to really understand them. The serving and hosting could be an issue but it would be worth it. #caterpiller#moths#flutterby
This video is almost hard to watch. I can relate to that struggle to escape the old skin. Those who keep spider pets know: spiders risk death every time they molt. Molting/eclosing are the downsides of having an exoskeleton. (that and being severely limited in size due to square cube laws, O2)
We see here another reason ants dominate: ants always have help. Often a whole team of sisters. Ants have protection during the dangerous time when their exoskeletons are soft. Advantage ant.
@futurebird my stick insects (Carausius morosus), nine of them, are now adults, and when they moulted they needed about the same depth below them to moult as they were going to become, so from hanging from the ceiling of the cage or a branch, they’d need 2 times their target depth below
That’s nothing though – take certain butterflies, eg a lot of nymphalidae ones, which chrysalise hanging upside down from a silk pad (others would use a silk sash around the outside around the waist and hang backwards on that from the secured tail on a branch) – the caterpillar about to moult spins a silk pad on the underside of a surface, then moults nearby and the tail of the chrysalis has hooks (it’s exactly like a hook & loop fastener (except not made by Velcro™)) and the chrysalis sort of ‘walks over’ and across the pad as it is moulting but the shrivelled up remains of the final caterpillar skin is between the chrysalis and the silk pad so it walks across the skin, shoves the skin out of the way until it falls, by which time it has found the silk pad and hangs there for several weeks
That’s an amazing thing to have evolved, that whole process, and all the possible failures it could entail every time
@futurebird I'm totally there for that! So many little video snips on my phone are because I thought that creature was too awesome not to video. Sometimes, it's also the only way for me to get a picture with the creature in it. 😂