Bill Ross, age 13, of Montgomery, Alabama, for his question:
What is a woolly bear?
Most members of the bear family wear shaggy fur coats and their playful young cubs could be called woolly. However, they are not related to the woolly bears in question. These remarkable creatures are caterpillars that wear fuzzy topcoats of long hair. They thrive from coast to coast, though we are most likely to notice them in the fall. In bygone days, one species rose to fame as a weather prophet.
Some 2,500 species of the insect world are classified in the Family Arctiidae, a name coined from the Greek word for "bear". In Europe, the handsome adult moths are called bears. This is in memory of their caterpillar days, when they are covered from tip to tip in thick furry coats. We call our native species woolly bear caterpillars. Our most common species include several eye catching tiger moths, the dainty acrea moth and the famous isabella moth.
The adult isabella is a medium sized moth, colored like golden honey. There is a light dusting of small black spots on her velvety wings and rows of small black buttons along her abdomen. She makes a brief appearance during the summer. Nobody notices when she comes out at night to lay her eggs on a plantain leaf. Few people notice when the tiny furry caterpillars begin their hungry life cycle.
Through the summer, the gorging caterpillars grow to be about two inches long. Then their remarkable outfits become obvious. Their black bullet shaped heads are just visible, poking through one end of their maxi coats of thick fuzzy fur. The basic color is black, with a rusty red band around the middle. They are the woolly bears.
As cool fall weather approaches, they leave their lawns and meadows and start to roam. They scuttle along at high speed (for them) over roads and pavements. Marching woolly bears then become obvious to one and all. Actually, they are seeking protected crannies where they can hibernate. New England settlers had a notion that the roaming woolly bears could predict the weather. If their rusty red belly bands were extra wide, the coming winter was supposed to be mild. If their bands were narrow, long spells of frosty snow and blustery blizzards were expected.
However, reliable observers discredit this charming folk story. They claim that a batch of woolly bears from a meadow may have wide belly bands and those from the next meadow may have narrow ones. Obviously the local weather conditions do not vary from meadow to meadow.
The caterpillar of the dainty yellow and white acrea moth also is a furry fellow with a reddish belly band. Caterpillars of the gaudy patchwork tiger moths wear brownish coats of very long silky hairs. All the woolly bear insects spin bulky cocoons, with furry hair mixed among the silken threads. The famous isabella sleeps through most of the winter as a caterpillar, curled up like a kitten. He spins his cocoon later and spends the spring as a pupa.