Crowd-sourcing images of caterpillars from nature apps allowed researchers to study the emergence of a new species of caterpillar.
Imagine a jungle. It’s probably a lush forest, filled with different bird songs and the hum of thousands of different kinds of insects. Now imagine a tundra: barren, windswept terrain with relatively few kinds of plants or animals.
The fall webworm is a moth found from Mexico to Canada whose caterpillars have either black or red heads. While this might seem like a subtle difference, caterpillars with these different colours seem to have different behaviours and appear at different times of the year, and genetic studies suggest that they are evolving into different species.
Birth of new species The process of speciation occurs when two groups of organisms belonging to the same species are separated by a barrier that prevents them from reproducing. The most well-known way that this can occur is through a physical barrier between the groups, like a mountain range or a highway.
Caterpillars in a lockdown Thanks to the fall webworm’s fluffy appearance and garden pest status, thousands of geotagged and dated photographs were available on the crowd-sourced science site iNaturalist. We reviewed 11,000 fall webworm photos from over 7,000 users, manually checking the thousands of photographs for whether the caterpillar was red- or black-headed.
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