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Heat For The Masses: Thermal Ecology Of The Western Tent Caterpillar, Victoria Dahlhoff

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

A unique feature of some gregarious, colonial insects is their ability to create external structures that alter environmental conditions for the entire (often family) group. A combination of physical alteration of local microhabitats and behavioral thermoregulation allows many of these animals to actively control their body temperatures, which allows them to regulate energy use and metabolism in variable thermal environments. Here I describe mechanisms of microhabitat modification and thermal regulation in the western tent caterpillar, Malacosoma californicum pluviale. Tent caterpillars build communal silk tents, whose temperatures can rise substantially above ambient air temperature. I experimentally manipulated colony sizes and examined …