The Forest Tent Caterpillar Moth (Malacosoma disstria) is the larva of a North American moth, found throughout the United States and Canada, and most common in the eastern regions.
These tent caterpillars do not make tents, rather they weave a silky sheet where they lie together during molting. They lay down strands of silk as they move over branches and travel along them like tightrope walkers. However, it has been shown that a trail pheromone secreted from the ventral surface of the posterior tip of the abdomen rather than the silk guides and stimulates trail following. The caterpillar are social and travel and feed en masse. The caterpillars live in deciduous trees, which they strip of leaves after emerging from their eggs. The moths favor oak, sweetgum and tupelo, aspen trees, and sugar maple for oviposition but the larvae can be found feeding on many other species of woody trees or shrubs when they disperse from ovipositional trees during outbreaks. The females lay eggs in masses of up to 300, which are stuck to twigs and covered with a gluey cement called spumaline which prevents them from desiccating or freezing over the winter. The eggs hatch the following winter.
Read more about Forest Tent Caterpillar Moth: Outbreaks, Appearance, Toxicity, Outbreak Cycles, Control Measures
Famous quotes containing the words forest, tent, caterpillar and/or moth:
“I was struck by this universal spring upward of the forest evergreens.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For even within his tent she accomplished his derision;
She loosed one veil and another, standing unafraid;
And he perished.”
—John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)
“That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at different periods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)