Bagworm

Description:

I see Bagworms pretty much every time I go out to take some wildlife pictures and I usually see these creatures one at a time. In other words, they appear to be quite solitary with no suggestion of any kind of social behaviour. On rare occassions, I have seen two of them in close proximity, but today i saw (for the first time) three of them, very close together on the same leaf of a sapling coconut palm. This unusual occurence does not, of course, suggest any form of social behaviour. I mention it only to emphasise that this is a very uncommon convergence.

Habitat:

Spotted in our backyard on a Coconut Palm (Cocos nucifera) known in the Philippines as Niyog.

Notes:

In many of my spottings of Psychidae, I have complained about the difficulty of identifying these insects and I have felt that the advice given, in some instances, is rather poor. As an example, the following is quoted verbatim from Wikipedia: "Each species makes a case particular to its species, making the case more useful to identify the species than the creature itself." So, if you look at the three Bagworms in my pictures (which I think it is reasonable to assume are all the same species), you will see that the bags (sometimes called cases) all appear to be made from similar materials, but the arrangement of the materials and the resulting appearance of each is quite individual. So, how can three bags, each of different appearance, be called "particular to its species". I think that is utterly nonesensical. I can only come to the conclusion that, in order to secure an identification of a Bagworm, it would be necessary to remove the moth from the bag, in order to look at it in its entirety. Then, of course, it would be necessary to have a data bank of pictures of all (or as many as possible) of the documented Bagworms. This is unlikely to ever happen and even if it were possible to identify these creatures in this way, I could not bring myself to remove a moth from its bag (probably killing it in the process) just so that I could have an identification. I would rather continue in ignorance and I suspect that all Project Noah members probably feel the same. .