I have always been fascinated by tent caterpillars. When I was very young, I could not understand why there were masses of silken spiderwebs in the trees. At some point, I finally realized that the webs were spun by masses of caterpillars. Since they eat the leaves of the trees, their webs appear only in certain trees. The caterpillars themselves are of the genus Malacosoma and the moth family
Lasiocampidae. The Lasiocampidae have over 2000 species and are not all discovered or classified.
Aack! is how I describe them. They devoured a lot of shade trees in Salt Lake City so bad several years that the City had to spray pesticide. No one like the infidel hanging caterpillars over the sidewalks.
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