“Can u not” – this caterpillar, probably.
When he was in the Peruvian Amazon recently, entomologist Aaron Pomerantz came across the "craziest caterpillar [he'd] ever seen."
Pomerantz works for ecotourism company Rainforest Expeditions and wrote about his discovery on their blog.
Aaron Pomerantz / PeruNature.com and Steven Senisi / Edtechlens.com
Whenever the caterpillar was disturbed by a loud sound, its four tentacle-like arms would pop out. You can see it for yourself in this video.
I might never have noticed this small brown insect had it not been for its unusual movement: noises would cause it to fire its tentacles in randomized directions, then slowly twirl back into a spring-like "ready" position to await its next alarm. This reaction to noise was so peculiar that once my group joined me around the creature, we proceeded to take turns yelling at it and filming its contorting reactions for over an hour.
He thinks it's a species of the Nematocampa genus, in the Geometrid family of moths.
But Andy Warren, senior collections manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History, told National Geographic that you'd have to wait until the caterpillar grew into a moth, or sequence its DNA, to be for sure of its species.
Aaron Pomerantz / PeruNature.com
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