PURPOSE To report a case of caterpillar setae embedded in the deep cornea and anterior chamber. METHODS A 26-year-old man was struck in his right eye by a caterpillar (Dendrolimus punctatus walker). Severe conjunctival injection, chemosis, and erosion of the cornea developed immediately. Numerous setae fragments were found to be embedded into the palpebral conjunctiva and deep cornea, extendi...

Predictability in the composition of tropical assemblages of insect herbivores was studied using a sample of 35,952 caterpillars (Lepidoptera) from 534 species, feeding on 69 woody species from 45 genera and 23 families in a lowland rainforest in Papua New Guinea. Caterpillar assemblages were strongly dominated by a single species (median 48% of individuals and 49% of biomass). They were spatia...

BACKGROUND The Asp Caterpillar, Megalopyge opercularis, is endemic to the southern United States and causes hundreds of human envenomations annually. Envenomation from the spines of the caterpillar causes severe pain, burning, swelling, nausea, abdominal distress, and headache. Despite the high prevalence of envenomations, little is known about the caterpillars, their geographical distribution,...

PURPOSE To report uveitis secondary to ocular penetration of caterpillar hairs (setae). METHODS Case report. A documented attack of acute anterior uveitis was caused by initially overlooked penetration of caterpillar setae. RESULTS A 66-year-old man presenting with unilateral hypertensive keratouveitis was treated with antiherpes simplex medication (along with local anti-inflammatory and cy...

Let T be a tree such that all its vertices of degree more than two lie on one path; that is, T is a caterpillar subdivision. We prove that there exists > 0 such that for every graph G with |V (G)| ≥ 2 not containing T as an induced subgraph, either some vertex has at least |V (G)| neighbours, or there are two disjoint sets of vertices A,B, both of cardinality at least |V (G)|, where there is no...

The celebrated Erdős-Hajnal conjecture states that for every proper hereditary graph class G there exists a constant ε = ε(G) > 0 such that every graph G ∈ G contains a clique or an independent set of size |V (G)|. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the symmetrized variant of this conjecture, where one additionally requires G to be closed under complementation. We show that any here...

Predators exert strong top-down pressure on herbivorous insects, but research on how predators affect herbivore fitness often focuses on the more active juvenile and adult life stages while ignoring the pupal or cocoon life stage. Few studies have investigated predation of lepidopteran pupae or cocoons and even fewer have investigated species that are not forest pests. Here we present a study o...