Watch Caterpillars Eating Exploding Seeds
Wednesday, 9 July 2025
When I was a kid there was a place on the walk home where touch-me-not balsam used to grow. Over the years, I had great fun touching their seed pods, as, if they were ripe enough, they would explode in contact with my fingers. Pow! The seeds would be ejected, sometimes quite a distance and always at super-high speed. However, during all my pod popping years I never once saw a caterpillar (or noticed one at least).
Yet the touch-me-not balsam is the favourite food of a
certain moth’s caterpillar. I never saw
one because the netted carpet moth (Eustroma reticulatum) was, metaphorically,
on its knees at that point in time. It
was, in fact, close to extinction in the UK and is now still only found in a
few places in the Lake District. That
was a good hundred miles away from where I grew up (Chester) and as such
explains why I never saw any of the moth’s caterpillars. It is, fortunately,
found elsewhere in Europe and Asia so there is no fear of a complete species
extinction – in fact the moth has seen a 900^% increase in abundance in the UK since
2000 (due to some clever conservation management).
That’s great news – but you might notice when you watch the
video below that this caterpillar doesn’t do much to help itself in terms of
staying safe… Just as I would never know which pod was going to pop when I was
a child, likewise the caterpillars have to risk, for the sake of a good munch,
being the trigger for an explosion which will send it flying through the
air. One can only hope that these caterpillars
have a safe landing and can make their way back to the plant without too much
trouble. It just leaves me wondering how
many times the average netted carpet moth caterpillar finds itself being
ejected through space before it undergoes its metamorphosis into adult form and
can use its wings instead…
Watch the amazing video from BBC Earth below.
