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Although I have not seen it for quite a number of years, I have seen substantially longer 'trains' of this caterpillars in the park before. I tried to obtain more info on the species, but unfortunately it seems I do not have the correct reference material.

Another impressive 'train' you see sometimes (which I also have not seen recently) is the Matebele Ants.

This is the longest we have seen so far

Yeah, this is more the type of 'trains' I recall.

These are members of the family Thaumetopoeidae (Processionary worms). There are nine species in Southern Africa, and in the KNP they occur only south of the Olifants River. The most common type is Anaphe reticulata.

The catterpillars form long "trains" when moving from one food source to another. The catterpillars walk touching the one in front and will stop abbruptly when one loose contact whith the one in front. These group can be up to 600 strong, but is usually a lot less.

When pupating they spin a silk envelope over the entire group. In this each larvae spin its own cocoon. You often see this spongy mass in hidden corners.

The highly attractive adult moths is short lived.

During Zebra and my last Kruger visit, beginning of June, we encountered these worms walking in a line Zebra’s trip report

Yesterday afternoon at Marloth we saw them again. I almost had a hart attack because from afar it seemed to be a massive white snake.

Enlarge photo to see better




They were making there way up into on of our Knob-thorn trees. We unfortunately did not have the time to see what they planned to do in the tree….. I will have a look next weekend.



Do any of you have an idea as to what type of worms these are and why they display this behaviour? Might it be to put off predators? They do look like one big snake….

Edited to change heading

Brand hulle jou as jy aan hulle vat?
Do they burn you when you touch them?

I am not going near those things, one of those burn worms nailed me on my leg once whilst I was in bed and it burned like hell itself. Had a nice swolen, tender mark on my leg for 3 days or so. Thought it was a spider... Remember how I screamed out: "Daar het hy my nou!"

They are called Processionary caterpillars /worms. There are 2 'believes' about this walking in a line... 1 is to find food. each caterpillar leaves a strong strand of silk behind them and those that follow walk along the line of silk.
So they are literally creating a silk road that helps keep the line together (the thread left by the leader makes it easier for the followers to keep to the straight and narrow)

And the second one is as you guessed to put off predators.

They are Processionary caterpillars, like the Ochrogaster lunifer. That one lives in Australia, but it will give you a good idea of what they are like and such.
As WTM says, stay well away from them, their hairs are known to irritate at lot, and also disperse in the wind, irritating peoples lungs!

Just for the clarification of the use of the term "worm" in SA:

Do you guys use worm as equivalent to caterpillar?
It just occured to me that you also call the larva/caterpillar of the mopani moth "Mopani worm".
To me worms and caterpillars are two very different animals...

I believe it might be more complex than following a strand of silk. (Admittedly only based on one observation of the caterpillars.)



What I observed one day while taking pictures is that when the line breaks for some reason (in that case caused by me moving a branch out of the line of sight of my camera) the whole procession comes to a halt.



The last caterpillar in the front line immediately halted and this caused a chain reaction of stopping all the way to the first caterpillar. The front caterpillar of the bakc line (the one that lost touch with its predecessor started slowly searching left and right until it connected with the one in front again and from there the whole train got moving again.

This leads me to believe there is (in addition to the silk thread maybe?) some form of tacticle or scent based mechanism involved in keeping the chain intact.

The adult processionary moth.

Does anybody knows the ID of these caterpillars?



Thank you!!

Magic, these look like Processionary worms. (members of the family Thaumetopoeidae)

See this link Processionary caterpillars