Functional Fashion From An Artist And A Caterpillar

A passion for fashion among the “bone collector caterpillar,” who wears a coat of body parts, and an artist who makes fabrics that remember.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 0:45Flora Lichtman?

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• 2:09Flora Lichtman?

  Hey, this is Flora Lichtman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

• 2:16Flora Lichtman?

  On today's show, extreme outerwear, from electronic programmable textiles to a caterpillar that spins a coat of many collected body parts. I promise you'll want to hear about it.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Most of the time, especially if you work on insects, not only is it not of interest to people, it is of active disinterest.

• 2:36Flora Lichtman?

  Look, you found your people. We're here. This program.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:45Flora Lichtman?

  On the island of Oahu, in the mountains, entomologists found a brand new species of caterpillar that is unusual in so many ways. First of all, it lives in a spider web and scavenges the entangled insects. To be a carnivorous caterpillar is already pretty strange. About 0.1% of all caterpillars eat meat. But that's not all. This caterpillar then takes the leftovers and decorates itself with the body parts of its victims. It's been named the bone collector caterpillar. Here to tell us all the juicy details about caterpillar lector and why it matters is Dan Rubinoff. He's an entomologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa

• 3:29Flora Lichtman?

  who studies the evolution, ecology, and conservation of insects. Dan, welcome to Science Friday.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

• 3:36Flora Lichtman?

  Dan, this caterpillar is really putting the freak into freak of nature, I feel like.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  I respectfully disagree.

• 3:45Flora Lichtman?

  How?

• 3:45Speaker 03

  It's got a hard scrabble life. But the craziest thing about these caterpillars, in my mind, is not just that they're carnivorous, but that they're living with spiders. I mean, they're literally living in Smog's lair, stealing treasure from under his nose. And it's a big ask to be a juicy caterpillar living under the eye of a spider that would eat you in a heartbeat. And so that's why they're doing this kind of gross thing is really just to survive. They... meticulously pick up little bits of arthropod, so mites, beetle wings, flywings, ant heads, whatever it is. They'll eat the little juicy bits that are left out of there, which are probably more like a bit of ant brain jerky.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  But then they take that head capsule and they attach it to their silk case that they live inside. And they also will take sort of shed spider intakument and attach that to the case. And the reason they're doing that is to fool the spider into thinking that they are not edible or interesting. And that allows them sort of free rein to roam around under and around the spider's web without getting eaten.

• 4:55Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, so the spider whose web they're living in is their predator?

• 5:00Speaker 03

  So caterpillars are tasty. Let's just get that out of the way. They're tasty and most things like to eat caterpillars. So the spider is perfectly willing to eat them if it can find them. Hiding in a case like that makes it hard for the spider to detect this juicy bit inside. So to say the spiders are predators of these caterpillars is true, but so is every Tom, Dick and Harry predator on the planet. You know, there's very few that would refuse a juicy caterpillar.

• 5:28Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, they're like the pig in the blanket of.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:31Flora Lichtman?

  The insect world.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Except the blanket is silk, but yeah.

• 5:35Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah. So describe what it looks like, this caterpillar.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Well, one of the first questions that people often ask is what does the caterpillar look like naked? Which is kind of an indecent question in my mind, but they are soft and squishy. They're pale. That goes for the entire group. So these bone collector caterpillars are one of over 400 species in the Hawaiian fancy case caterpillar group that is endemic, only found in the Hawaiian islands.

• 6:03Flora Lichtman?

  Wait, is it called, is it, it's, it's scientific name is fancy case caterpillars?

• 6:08Speaker 03

  No, that's our fun name for it. The, the scientific name for it is hyposmacoma, but that doesn't really roll off the tongue. And so we realized that, you know, all these birds have, have cool, common names, right? Yellow-bellied sapsucker is very evocative. So why can't these insects also? So have a little bit of charm. And so, yeah, they're Hawaiian fancy case because they're building these silk cases and they're not drab. So if you can imagine these 400 species, they're spread into about 18 different case types. So everybody's assigned to a case type. If you're a burrito case type maker, you make a burrito case. Other ones are making cone cases, bugle cases, crab cases, purse cases. You get the idea, but

• 6:51Flora Lichtman?

  I love it. Yeah.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  There is only one of these 400 that is the bone collector caterpillar. And it is the only representative of its lineage. Every single other lineage of case type has multiple species, and that's only in the Waianae Mountains on Oahu. So that's quite unusual even for these Hawaiian fancy case caterpillars to have a group that is defined only by a single species in that lineage.

• 7:16Flora Lichtman?

  Wow.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  And that's probably due to extinction. So this bone collector caterpillar is the last of its kind. And we know that there were other ones in the past, and it's, it's very likely there was a species on Kauai as well, at least, if not distributed down the islands. But it's gone. And, and there really is an ongoing extinction crisis here. So every time you find something crazy and cool like that, there's a little part of my brain which is wondering, what did we miss? What was here 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 700 years ago? That's equally unimaginable that we just didn't have the, the fortune to, to find before it, it disappeared.

• 7:56Flora Lichtman?

  Well, I'm glad you found this one. And, and tell us the story. How did you find it?

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I can definitely give you the first experience we had. We were in the Waianae Mountains, walking along a trail, and we're doing our usual thing, looking on tree bark for hypoxicoan. One of my grad students starts looking in the tree hole underneath, and he's looking at something and, and he shows me, and it looks like a bag, a little tiny bag, a capsule, almost like the size of maybe a Tylenol gel capsule. But imagine it's white and then covered in little pepper, basically in little bits of bug. And you're looking at it and you're thinking, what is that? And even though we've been collecting hyposma coma for years at that point, it still looked off. It wasn't the sort of tight case we're used to.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  The camouflage was not camouflage, it was bug bits. And so we picked it up in a little, we weren't even sure there's a caterpillar in there. We thought maybe it was something else like, I mean, really, God knows. But we pick it up and a little caterpillar peeks its head out and we're surprised. Take that back and we're rearing it out and we're not even sure it's, it's part of the hyposma coma group. But sure enough, it grows through and you get this, this moth out. And we're a little bit surprised, but we figure, oh, well, this species happened to find itself in a place where there are lots of bug bits. So by coincidence, it just adorned itself with bug bits. And to be fair, it could be that I'm particularly dense and that these would have been obvious to other people. But we want to be sure when you see something that not only you didn't expect,

• 9:27Speaker 03

  that the, you really couldn't have imagined. You know, there's a lot of hesitancy to say, yeah, that's what it is. You're, you're looking for alternative explanations that, that jive with things that you've had or seen before. This gets to the sort of way that I think science functions. I think the public often thinks it's a lot of eureka moments in the bathtub where suddenly we figure something out. But really, in a lot of ways, it's like watching a sunrise where it just gets slowly more and more clear what we're actually looking at. And so it, it took us years to sort of become convinced that these guys were exclusively using bug bits. And even longer to figure out that they were exclusively hanging out with spiders. So that's why it took us more than a decade to come out with a paper like this.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  It's just gradually understanding more and more about it to the point where you really feel like this is what we're seeing. It's crazy. It's not something anybody would have imagined. Uh, it seems like a really questionable life choice if you're a caterpillar, but they are doing it and they're making it work.

• 10:29Flora Lichtman?

  Does this caterpillar turn into some kind of beautiful butterfly? Like, does it leave this dark chapter of collecting body parts behind?

• 10:36Speaker 03

  I feel like it's more of a hardscrabble life than a creepy collector, just personally. I mean, if you think about it, it'd be like if Hannibal Lecter lived at a morgue and his job was to clean up. Nobody would say, oh, that's really creepy. They'd be like, oh, you're doing a nice job.

• 10:50Flora Lichtman?

  They are eating those bits of dead bug.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess there's that. That's fair.

• 10:55Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, okay.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  So, no, I do have a bias. I recognize it.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  So, yes, they do turn into lovely tiny moths. I think some people would say, oh, it's a little brown moth, but actually, when, and that's because they're tiny. These moths are a little bit bigger than a grain of rice when they pop out. But they are really gorgeous if you look at the color patterns in them. And if you want to talk about the Hawaiian fancy case caterpillars more broadly, there are some truly spectacular tiny moths in that group. You know, one of them, the species name for it is Hyposmacoma elegantula. That's how elegant that person thought that tiny little moth was.

• 11:33Flora Lichtman?

  Is finding a species like this, like, where is this on the bucket list for an entomologist?

• 11:40Speaker 03

  You know, respectfully, we all have such different bucket lists.

• 11:44Flora Lichtman?

  I guess I mean for you. We don't have to generalize.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  It's worse than that. I, this isn't something that really even occurred to me. I, it wasn't on my bucket list because it wasn't in my realm of thinking that there would be something. I knew there would be neat things when I moved to Hawaii. I knew there'd be neat things to discover. I was excited to see what they would be. But the crazy thing about this place is that evolution has gone off the hook in ways that, again, you wouldn't imagine and that you can't really believe when you see them.

• 12:18Flora Lichtman?

  I mean, I love this story because I love all sort of extreme evolution stories, like, you know, organisms doing things we'd never thought of. But why do you care about this caterpillar?

• 12:30Speaker 03

  I think it gives us a look under the hood on how evolution functions. And, you know, obviously caterpillars and spiders occurred together across the planet. But only here has this sort of peculiar relationship evolved. And it just makes me wonder what else we can learn about life on the planet from examining things here in Hawaii specifically. There are lots of great places to do work. But Hawaii particularly, due to that combination of isolation and then all the climate zones we have, has been particularly interesting for trying to understand evolution. And I think it's because when life gets here,

• 13:15Speaker 03

  it has an unprecedented situation and so it responds in unprecedented ways.

• 13:21Flora Lichtman?

  I think that's a perfect place to leave it.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 13:24Flora Lichtman?

  Dan Rubinoff is an entomologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who studies the evolution ecology and conservation of insects.

• 13:35Flora Lichtman?

  Don't go away because after the break, more strange garments. Human ones this time. We'll talk to a textile designer who's making programmable clothes that might be able to tell us about ourselves.

• 13:50Speaker 00

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• 15:52Flora Lichtman?

  Up next, more extreme outerwear. How might we think about our own clothes differently? Instead of simple coverings, what if we imagined our garments as record keepers? Witnesses to every sound, every smell, every touch that we encountered during our day? My next guest, a computer scientist and artist, is refashioning clothes with sensors and other tech, so they do just that and more. Dr. Laura Devendorf is an information scientist with the Atlas Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she directs the Unstable Design Lab. Laura, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. This is lovely. Where did this idea come from that textiles might be a way to remember?

• 16:36Flora Lichtman?

  That's an interesting question. I think...

• 16:40Speaker 04

  Early on, finishing my PhD, I had an opportunity to collaborate on a smart textile product. And it just struck me about, you know, if our garments were sentient in some way and all the things they heard and all the things they saw, how interesting it would be to play that back and to kind of relive it through a different lens.

• 17:03Flora Lichtman?

  I love that idea. I mean, you made a quilt that registered touch. Is that right?

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Uh, not a quilt technically, because the textile people will know.

• 17:14Flora Lichtman?

  Thank you. Please, correct me.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  It is a hand-woven textile, so it's designed using a software I've actually built and it communicates with a digital jacquard loom. And I wove it by hand with all the circuitry integrated at the time of weaving.

• 17:33Flora Lichtman?

  And what do the sensors do?

• 17:35Speaker 04

  So each one of those sensors is made from felted stainless steel and wool. And so what happens is when you press it down, the stainless steel fibers in the felt make more contacts and lower the electrical resistance so you can measure it. And then the wool, being very springy, kind of pops the felt back out when you stop pressing. So each one of those pads actually measures where and how hard somebody presses it.

• 18:05Flora Lichtman?

  I love this idea that, you know, I'm gonna all be colloquial, that like the blankets around us are registering our touches.

• 18:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:15Flora Lichtman?

  And you haven't done just tapestries, right? Tell me about this motherhood dress you made.

• 18:20Speaker 04

  You know, I started really thinking about garments and what they might remember. And I thought, you know, at the time, I had two small children and I had started an academic position, which was quite difficult and stressful.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  And it was a generative idea for me to think about the people who need us and what they expect from us. And I really was thinking about my younger daughter at the time was God, two or three and was just so intensely physical. Like she would need to have her hand on my neck at almost all times. And it, you know, it feels a little bit like suffocating, but you know, you're going to miss it. Right? So you, how do you hold on to it? The concept was that I wanted to put these force sensors all over my body. And in order to determine where I held my daughter and I put tape all over the places where I feel like she made the most contact.

• 19:18Speaker 04

  Then I used those tape marks to design where the force sensors would go. And then it registered all the touches across a day and it stored them on a little memory chip. So then there was also a playback mode. So I was imagining, okay, let's say 10 years in the future, I want to see what these forces were like. What the data will do is it'll actually play back on all of those force sensors as heat. And if you view it through a thermal camera, you can actually see it as a literal heat map across the surface of the garment.

• 19:55Flora Lichtman?

  Does it feel warm?

• 19:57Speaker 04

  It does feel warm.

• 19:58Flora Lichtman?

  Like you could, does it feel like a proxy for the sort of experience of getting a squeeze?

• 20:03Speaker 04

  So, you know, there's some technical challenges there because it needs quite a lot of power to heat up. So you can wear it, but you have to be next to an outlet.

• 20:15Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah. Okay. So these, these pieces, they're art pieces and they make, they make us think about fabrics differently. But do you think that there's a future where we all might be wearing electronic textiles?

• 20:27Speaker 04

  Hmm. I think yes, but maybe not in the way that we think. I think often now when we're thinking of electronic textiles, we're thinking of phones on your body, gadgets and devices. And I think. The future for e-textiles needs to look a little bit different. Um, I think in some ways, the garment as a kind of sensor, as a kind of playful surface, might be a little bit more interesting and new than necessarily the garment as something that, you know, measures you and gives feedback. So, you know, we'll definitely see e-textiles in medical settings, you know, for telemetry and things like that. But in terms of like,

• 21:13Speaker 04

  everyday e-textiles, I think it's going to be something that's maybe a little bit more soothing than our technology is now.

• 21:22Flora Lichtman?

  I like that optimistic future you're painting.

• 21:26Speaker 04

  You know, I'm hoping to manifest it.

• 21:28Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah. I mean, I think your work prompts us to rethink clothing in a way and what it could be. What do you want us to think when we put on clothes?

• 21:41Speaker 04

  Oh, I mean, I really want to make a little machine that like knits and unknits your dress every day. So every day it becomes its new manifestation, you know. Um, but I love the art of dressing. You're making choices about how you present yourself in the world and your identity and what you believe in and the groups you associate with and the groups you don't associate with. And so I think there's a real artfulness and a joy in that, that I would like to celebrate.

• 22:11Flora Lichtman?

  Thank you, Laura.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Thank you so much, Flora.

• 22:14Flora Lichtman?

  Dr. Laura Devendorf is an information scientist with the Atlas Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she directs the Unstable Design Lab. And you can learn more about Laura's work at sciencefriday.com/shrouds.

• 22:31Flora Lichtman?

  And that is about all we have time for. Lots of folks helped make the show happen, including Sandy Roberts. Robin Casmer.

• 22:40Speaker 05

  Charles Burquist. George Harper.

• 22:43Flora Lichtman?

  I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.