As I walked home through Highgate Woods today I noticed an tiny green caterpillar dangling from a long ‘thread’. It’s tiny green body was suspended at approximately head hight. It seems so odd that a bright green creature might have evolved a behavior that causes it to suspend itself so visibly in mid air.
I tried to take a photo of it, however it was swaying too briskly, even in the calm of the woods. In the end, the best I could do was a slightly blurred shot which I achieved by steading the thread with my finger.
This cluster of debris hangs a few metres below the canopy of the woods.
Later as I continued on my way I noticed another collection of hanging oddities; random looking collections of some kind of plant life. Had a similar caterpillar created this as a lodge in which to pupate? If indeed another creature of the same species did this, how did such a small creature manage to suspend such a large quantity of bracken?
In the high resolution version of this photo it is just about possible to see that the parts of this structure are bound together with shorter lengths of thread.
A tiny grub hanging from a single silken thread. Could this be the culprit?
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