After working in her yard planting flowers all day Thursday, Kathy Carlin decided to take in a movie. But when she returned home on Red Fox Drive, it was Carlin who thought she had stepped into a horror film.
Call it the "Invasion of the Black Caterpillars," only because black sounds more menacing than brown or gray.
Covering the bottom two panels of her blue garage doors were hundreds of tiny, squirming black and brown caterpillars. They were crawling all over the asphalt driveway, too.
"At first I thought they were seeds from the aspen trees but they were moving around," said Carlin.
Her first reaction was, "Yuck!"
Carlin did what a lot of other people did. She called the Alaska Cooperative Extension Service at the University of Alaska Fairbanks on Friday morning and talked to land resource agent Michelle Hebert, a guru of sorts when it comes to insects and gardening.
By noon on Friday, Hebert had received approximately 50 calls from residents concerned or just curious about what seemed to be a sudden explosion of the caterpillars Thursday afternoon along Farmers Loop and on Chena Ridge. Hebert wasn't shocked, or even surprised when she started getting calls. She witnessed the explosion firsthand at her home on Wolverine Lane, not far from where Carlin lives.
Hebert left her home at 2 p.m. after filming a clip for a gardening tips segment she does for KTVF Channel 11. When she returned at 4:30 p.m., there were thousands of caterpillars crawling around her paved driveway.
"It was like they appeared out of nowhere," she said.
The phone at her home and at the Cooperative Extension Service started ringing almost at the same time, she said.
"People have been bringing bags of them in," she said.
People want to know what they are, what kind of danger they pose to plants and what can be done to get rid of them, Hebert said. The answers to those questions aren't exactly clear.
Bug experts at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and U.S. Forest Service, who couldn't be reached for this story, didn't know what the caterpillars were, said Hebert.
"We're not sure what it is, but it's a type of cutworm," she said. "We haven't seen this one up here before."
The caterpillars are only about 1 inch long and one-quarter of an inch thick.
"They just look like a typical caterpillar," said Hebert.
Sudden eruptions are typical of cutworms, Hebert said. The ground temperature reaches a certain temperature and the worms emerge.
"They overwinter as small caterpillars in leaf litter and when the temperature reaches a critical phase they just start crawling out of the leaf litter and start looking for food sources," she said, noting that they like to eat young leaves and buds.
Where the caterpillars came from and why they appeared only in isolated areas of Fairbanks--all the reports came from around Farmers Loop and Chena Ridge--is a mystery. Hebert suspects they were around last fall, but if that were the case someone most likely have reported them, she said.
The caterpillars could have moved up to Alaska from the Northwest, Hebert speculated.
"We're seeing more and more insects moving up from the Northwest as the climate gets warmer," she said. "We're seeing an increase in pest populations in general and we're seeing new pests appearing. This may just be another new one."
It remains to be seen what the caterpillars will eat but Hebert suspects they'll go after the leaves on alder, birch and cottonwood trees, as well as rose bushes.
Hebert is keeping several caterpillars in boxes at her office--she took them home this weekend to feed them--in hopes of getting them to pupate into moths.
"What we're doing is rearing them," she said. "We think they'll eat, get into a cocoon phase and hatch out as moths and then we'll be able to positively identify them."
Hebert advises homeowners who notice the caterpillars on their asphalt driveways or houses to wash them off. She also recommends getting some kind of caterpillar poison to kill them. One common type is a microbial insecticide called Bacillus thuringiensis, Hebert said.
"It's earth-friendly and doesn't hurt anything but caterpillars," she said, adding that it's available at most garden centers.
There are faster-acting, more powerful poisons available, but Hebert recommended "earth-friendly" ones to start. She mentioned diatomaceous earth and neem oil as two other possibilities.
Sam Helms didn't notice the caterpillars crawling up his house on Summit Drive until his son-in-law pointed them out on Thursday afternoon. He sprayed them with a bleach solution "to hold them down," as he put it, but they were back on Friday.
"I've never seen 'em before in 52 years," Helms said. "They're all over the ground."
Whatever they are, the caterpillars are "creepy" to Carlin.
"They're freaking me out," she said. "I couldn't go to sleep (Thursday) night because I was afraid they were going to creep inside my house and crawl all over me."
Things didn't get much better Friday. The caterpillars were still crawling on her garage doors and driveway. Every time she washed them or swept them away, they returned.
When she looked down and saw a golf-ball-sized glob of caterpillars mauling a small aspen leaf, she was horrified. They were like maggots on a carcass, wriggling and writhing as they devoured the leaf.
"Look at that," Carlin exclaimed. "Ooh, yuck."
The sight appeared to push Carlin over the edge.
"If they're going to start eating leaves I'm going to get some of that poison," she said.
It was either that or suck them up with her Shop-Vac, Carlin said.Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
