Caterpillar
Quick! Anybody remember the hit dice on a carrion crawler?¹ Reader Matt Smith sends in this photo of caterpillar from Australia.
Well OF COURSE it’s from Australia. What IS IT about freaky animals and Australia? I mean, is there some weird genetic scrambling force down there? Or is there maybe some migration gene crosslinked with excessive mutation that says “Hey, we just grew tentacles; time to migrate down under.” Maybe Nature herself used it as a penal colony long before humans did. “Whoa, there, snakey. You have enough venom in your head to kill the Eastern Seaboard. Off to Australia, mate.” Or maybe it’s like an exclusive club with tight entrance requirements. I wonder if spiders get turned away on boats all the time down there. “Nar, mate, we already got six kinds that kill people. If you or any of your friends back in Chile can, say, burst into flames or shoot lasers out yer bum, come back and see us, hey?”
Thanks for this photo, Matt… it’s just amazing. I have no idea if those tentacles are dangerous but my money is on “yes”.
¹ 3+1 HD in AD&D; 3d8+4 (19hp) in 3.5 ruleset.
tceisele said,
January 21, 2008 @ 8:36 am
It looks like some cross between a Monarch Butterfly caterpillar and, oh, I don’t know, maybe Cthulhu? Is that milkweed that it’s hanging out on?
I’ve got a theory about why Australian animals are so much weirder/more venomous than the ones up here in the temperate zone of North America: Australian animals are mainly competing with each other for limited resources, and we are looking at the end results of a lot of interspecies “arms races” (”So, you think you can become immune to my poison? Well, try *this* one! And for good measure, I’ll put it in a tentacle that I can swat you with from a distance! Mwahahahaha!”). Here in NA on the other hand, particularly in the north, they are mainly just trying to survive the winter, and pressure from the other survivors of winter is almost an incidental issue.
Besides, up until about 10,000 years ago, Michigan at least was under about a mile of ice, and all our organisms migrated up from further south during almost historic times. So, our fauna is a small subset of the most common southern organisms, and there really hasn’t been time to develop much that is interestingly weird and different.
Wayne said,
January 21, 2008 @ 12:46 pm
A Google search for “caterpillar tentacle australia” indicates that this might be /Euploea core/. The photos of /E. core/ at http://www.geocities.com/brisbane_nymphs/Crow.htm look pretty similar.
Don said,
January 21, 2008 @ 9:28 pm
Hrm. Wonder what a carrion crawler will look like in 4th edition? Yet another one to suck money from me …
And I’ll buy it too. *sigh*
Very nice pic though. Vibrant colors, wavy tentacles … pretty cool.
» Insect Picture of the Day said,
January 21, 2008 @ 10:23 pm
[…] cool! I got a photo put on Insect Picture of the Day. Check it out. Well OF COURSE it’s from Australia. What IS IT about freaky animals and Australia? I mean, […]
djfoobarmatt said,
January 21, 2008 @ 11:29 pm
Don, Yep I’d say that’s the same animal as it was seen in Coolangatta (near Brisbane as mentioned in the post) and on a similar looking vine.
djfoobarmatt said,
January 21, 2008 @ 11:30 pm
sorry - i was replying to Wayne not Don.
vickmuffin said,
January 29, 2008 @ 6:49 pm
u should set this one up to b a background its awesome adn my favorite thus far
David Brady said,
January 30, 2008 @ 8:51 pm
vickmuffin: Thanks! I’m glad you like it.
Unfortunately, the image on the site is already at the highest resolution I had available. You can get it by clicking on the “larger version” link in the post; it is 1280×960.
Enjoy!