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1 Reviews
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- navada rated 17 months ago
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"A fast-crawling plague of toxic caterpillars is giving Wimmera locals a serious case of the creeps. Tree lovers are bristling as the spiky bugs chomp their way south along the Henty Highway towards Dooen. Since March, the processional caterpillars have stripped at least 8km of big sugar gums, some 80 years old.
But the creepy sacs the crawlies build are the real nightmare material. Leathery grub-filled sacs as big as beach balls hang from branches, as many as 40 to a tree. After stuffing themselves on leaves all night, the critters literally hit the sac and void themselves.
Some sacs bulge grotesquely with protruding lumps the size of dog heads, like breeding pods in the movie Alien. Others look more like diseased organs.
Inside, with its revolting mixture of green excrement and dead and live grubs, is worse."
Dooen is just a few kilometres north of Horsham, which is the capital of the Wimmera. I grew up in Horsham and my family still lives there. Horsham residents have been doing it tough, battling the worst drought on record for over ten years.
Just to make life more interesting for the local sheep and wheat farmers, disgusting poisonous caterpillars are destroying well-established shade trees when they are desperately needed to serve as windbreaks on the dusty Wimmera plains.
Trees are already dying rapidly due to the persistent drought, and now this horrible little critter is adding to the challenge.
Sometimes it seems that Mother Nature is suffering from a serious bout of PMS.
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