Page 30 - The Book of Caterpillars: A Life-Size Guide to Six Hundred Species From Around the World

CATERPILLARS

AND PEOPLE

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Butterflies are celebrated in literature and art, and moths make an occasional

sinister appearance, but their larvae feature more rarely and play quite
singular and disparate roles in popular culture. Some species are still best
known as destructive pests, but the caterpillar has important uses, too, as
BELOW The larger
than life caterpillar a centuries-old producer of fine silk and, increasingly, as a nutritious food.
of Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland, drawn
in black and white by
the illustrator John CATERPILLARS IN POPULAR CULTURE
Tenniel, is a beautifully
surreal image of Many of today’s children and their parents are familiar with The Very
an insect otherwise
largely unrepresented Hungry Caterpillar, created by Eric Carle, the eponymous hero of which
in literature, and one
that, once seen, is consumes ever-increasing amounts of unlikely food, pupates, and becomes
almost impossible
to forget. a glorious butterfly. An earlier celebrity is the hookah-smoking caterpillar
of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland, first drawn by the Victorian artist
John Tenniel, the insect later appearing as a
surreal blue animation in Disney’s 1951 Alice
in Wonderland movie, and then in CGI form,

voiced by Alan Rickman, in Tim Burton’s
2010 movie of the same name. In a song from
the 1952 film musical Hans Christian Andersen,
Danny Kaye’s “Inchworm,” with its curious

looping gait, is “measuring the marigolds,”
while the Scottish singer Donovan sang—
somewhat inaccurately—“Caterpillar sheds
its skin to find a butterfly within” in his 1967 hit
“There is a Mountain.”