Hey, this is Flor Lichten, and you're listening to Science Friday.

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.

Most of the time, especially if you work on

insects, not only is it not of interest to people, it is of active disinterest. Look, you found

your people. We're here. This program. Yeah, exactly. 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 who studies the evolution ecology and conservation of insects. Dan, welcome to Science Friday.

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

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

I respectfully disagree. How? 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, fly wings, 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. 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 intakement and attach that to the case. And the reason they're doing that

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