Oh, Woolly Worm, What of Winter?
PROTECTED CONTENT
If you’re a current subscriber, log in below. If you would like to subscribe, please click the subscribe tab above.
Username and Password Help
Please enter your email and we will send you a password reset link.
The Old Wives Tale of the Woolly Bear Caterpillar
By Emily Bontrager
Many old wives’ tales are still passed down to the younger generations of today. These tales often include stories, superstitions, legends, and myths.
As this legend goes, the woolly worm or woolly bear caterpillar can predict how mild or harsh a winter will be by what color it is.
The woolly worms have black bristle-like hair on each end of their body and a rustic red, orange, or brown band in the middle.
According to folklore, the color of the worm shows us how severe or mild the coming winter will be.
If you see wider bands of reddish-brown on the worm, it means that a warmer, milder winter is coming. If the reddish-brown band is smaller and the worm has more black bands, this points towards a harsher winter.
Each woolly worm also has 13 distinct segments on its body, which are said to represent the 13 weeks of winter.
This time of year, the little fuzzy worms are seen running amuck. These worms are the larva of the Isabella Tiger Moth (Pyrrharctia isabella).
The Isabella Tiger Moth has yellowish-orange and cream-colored wings with black spots. The moth is common in northern Mexico, the United States, and the southern part of Canada.
In 1948, Dr. C. H. Curran, who worked as the curator of insects at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, decided to test the theory of woolly worms and their relation to predicting weather.
Dr. Curran collected and measured the woolly bear caterpillars and compared the bands to the winter weather.
He collected data for eight years and found that the middle bands on the worms he looked at took up more than a third of the caterpillars’ bodies, which matched up to the milder winters that had occurred. Dr. Curran knew his data samples were small and even though his data matched up to the old wives’ tale, it was not scientifically proven due to the small quantity of worms he studied.
According to the article on National Geographic’s website, “Can woolly bear caterpillars really predict the weather?” by Jason Bittel, some scientists have studied the woolly worms and have failed to find any relationship between their color patterns and the severity of oncoming weather.
The article goes on to say, “But woolly bear colors can tell you other things. For example, these caterpillars tend to shed their exoskeletons six times before transforming into moths –a process known as molting. And each time they do, they become more rusty in color and less black. This means that the youngest caterpillars are usually all black, while more colorful caterpillars tend to be the wizened, elders of a given population.”
If you are an enthusiast of woolly worms, you can go check out plenty of festivals that celebrate these fuzzy creatures each year.
The Woolly Worm Festival is held in Banner Elk, North Carolina and celebrates the woolly worms by having woolly worm races. There are also festivals like the Beattyville’s Woolly Worm Festival in Beattyville, Kentucky, the Lewisburg Fall Festival & Wooly Worm Winter Weather Prognostication in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and the Woolly Bear Festival in Vermilion, Ohio.
Even if there is no solid evidence of the old wives’ tale that the woolly worms can predict what will happen this winter, stop and enjoy them for a moment and watch these little fuzzy creatures hurry along to get to their destination.
Related Posts
Meet the Candidates Event to be Held July 24
