I have stumbled upon several interesting videos on a YouTube channel call SmarterEveryDay every so often in the past, but hadn’t browsed the channel thoroughly until very recently. What got my attention this time is a video that I called “a different kind of swarm”, which documents an interesting and unique behavior of a group of caterpillars. This kind of caterpillar swarm behavior is much different from the swarm examples that we’re typically familiar with, such as a school of fish, a flock of birds or an ant colony. The video below not only documents the bizarre mode of locomotion from the caterpillars, but also provids a potential explanation for the evolution of this strategy and identifies the bio-inspired design principles abstracted from it.

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