apydiagirls

I was taking a long walk in a park near where I live on Sunday and came across a strange phenomena which I've personally never seen before ( although on further investigation,I found this kind of thing does occur, but no examples I found matched the level of what I witnessed). At first I thought the tree in the photo below had been treated in some way by a surgeon, and that some kind of protective film had been sprayed over it perhaps. When I looked closer, I noticed the tree was infested with caterpillars and that the entire tree was infact, literally cocooned in silk.

Almost every inch of the tree was crawling with tiny caterpillars and in the V's of the tree's branches, lay more unhatched nests of them. The silk looked like very thick spiderweb. Before we noticed all the tiny caterpillers, my friend was joking that she didn't want to meet the one that had spun all that silk. Some passers by stopped and were looking rather alarmed at the tree, they hadn't seen anything like it before. One of the girls wouldn't come near the tree. It was very hard to identify what species of caterpillar they were but I knew they were a species of micro-moth caterpillars, of which there are thousands of hard to identify types in Britain.

So I did a bit of research because I was really quite impressed at what they had done and eventually, I narrowed it down to a species called Yponomeuta evonymella which transform into a little moth called a Small Ermine and which exhibit exactly this kind of behaviour. They walked on my hand in a funny inch-worm way and were dark and speckled.

Unfortunately, my digi-cam had some kind of dust on the lens and I hadn't noticed till I saw the photo's, hence the hazy look of these shots. Annoyingly, all the shots I took of things other than the tree, after I cleaned the lens are crystal clear. Typical. I'll try and go back with my non-rubbish camera and hopefully get some more detailed shots. I've been wondering if the other tree's in the area will suffer such defoliation to the extent that this one did as wee Scottish caterpillars get very hungry, fast, don't you know and tend to move onto the next tree as soon as they are done.


Examining the tree.


You can see that the trunk is totally wrapped in silk.


As you can see, the tree has no leaves at all. It amazes me that one species was responsible for all this silk spinning hard work. It has such a ghostly feel when your standing next to it I have to admit.


I think you could mistake this as the work of spiders if you weren't aware. Very "Blair witch" in a way don't you think?


This gives a better impression of what it looked like.

And that's all. Bye.