ANIMAL OR VEGETABLE? 
By Captain CayLny WEBSTER, F.Z.S. 
HE vegetable bulrush caterpillar is a most extraordinary natural paradox, for it 
possesses characteristics at the same time animal and vegetable. In appearance 
it is distinctly animal, but its habits and mode of growth are so decidedly vegetable 
that at first glance one may well hesitate to classify it correctly or account for its 
origin. The body averages about three inches in length and resembles the mummy 
of a large caterpillar, the skin “remaining intact as during life, with the head, feet, 
and every wrinkle of the body complete in every detail. 
The substance of this paradox is hard and pithy instead of being soft and pulpy. 
Yet even this tough and fibrous woody structure reveals under the microscope the 
appearance of the transformed viscera of the animal with all its organs undisturbed. 
From one end of this mummy springs a long and rush-like stalk, aemenallly from six 
to twelve inches in length, bearing on its extremity the club of a diminutive bulrush. 
It is most often found in the leaf-mould at the base of some huge tree. Here; 
by looking carefully among the mosses and ferns, it may be discovered as a small 
brown shoot projecting a few inches above the ground. When this is excavated at 
its root, some nine or ten inches below the ground will be found the body of the 
deceased caterpill ar, forming the root of the bulrush. This complex organism in its 
first stage 1s the larva of a large moth. 
When this caterpillar has eaten its fill and attained its fullest growth, it seeks 
some place of retirement, where, undisturbed, it may undergo its mneiamomalnosis into 
a chrysalis, and it usually finds a convenient place among the soft soil under some 
large tree. But before it enters its place of concealment it is attacked by a disease 
in the form of a fungus germ which has by some means found an entrance into its 
body, most probably through its breathing-pores, and when once established in such a 
favourable environment the germ commences to grow by throwing out minute thread- 
like fibres (hyphe); these increase with great rapidity, spreading throughout the body 
of the caterpillar and feeding upon it until all the animal tissue has been transformed 
into the substance of a fungus. Then, finding no more food, the plant sends up 
toward the light its own seed-bearing stalk (stroma), which appears a few inches above 
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