A most bizarre and mysterious cocoon
whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com
whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com
Well, there goes the rest of my evening. ;)
After all, he's got the quick movements with the stops in between, and he wears some pretty colorful locking outfit. Since I can't find any evidence for Campbell inheriting this behavior from the spider or the other way round, I say it co-evolved.
Example cocoon: http://bugguide.net/images/raw/Y0BQZSBQF0AQJ08KLSBQTK5KCK4K9...
[1] http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/a-most-bi...
Instead of hiding, the caterpillar builds an open-air net-like structure which hangs by a thread from the bottom of a leaf. The video hypothesizes that the structure both protects the pupa from ants and allows rain to flow through it (both of which seem like critical features in the Amazonian rainforest).
Also, it looks really cool.
My approach is to bang in various words and do image searches, forcing some and not others, and then try similar words. [weird cocoon] or [weird egg sac peru] and then sometimes including a subject word. (Entomology).
Then I do a TinEye search, or a GoogleImage search to see if I can find other pages talkng about it.
This feels sub-optimal.
What's a better approach?
http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&sa=N&hl=en&authuser=0&biw=...
The next time the guy is out in the jungle and sees one the thing to do is to take it home, put it in a jar, and wait to see what pops out. I learned about mosquito eggs that way, as a youth I thought they were tadpole eggs, put them in my jar and waited for frogs. Instead I got mosquito larvae and then a jar of dead mosquitos (I didn't take the top off once I recognized the larval form.)
It might not be the only bug that believes fences make good neighbors.
FYI: I found out about that from http://io9.com/we-have-absolutely-no-clue-what-built-this-cr...
It does look like that, but it doesn't make sense, since if the flimsy fence is strong enough to keep something out, the cocoon should also be strong enough.