Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-to-survive-an-infestation-of-toxic-caterpillars Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126700 Points: 4 #…
The oak processionary caterpillar, which is spreading as Europe warms, fills the air with microscopic hairs that inflict excruciating rashes.
June 27th, the hottest day ever recorded in Berlin, where I live, began with a whimper. My apartment does not have air-conditioning, and neither does a friend’s garden cottage where I took refuge, so my poor, panting greyhound was audibly distressed. I walked her to a park to cool off. At the entrance, I passed a sign that warned of the presence of Eichenprozessionsspinner, caterpillars with stinging hairs that German news outlets have called a “citywide plague.” The government was hiring workers in protective suits to vacuum them up. I wasn’t too worried, though. Germans often overreact to animal nuisances with complicated schemes. Who else would try to clean nature with a Hoover?
The oak processionary caterpillar, as it is known in English, is a squiggle of dark skin covered in wiry white hairs that look like the whiskers on a witch’s warts. But you never see just one caterpillar. Oak processionary caterpillars live with hundreds or thousands of their siblings, and together they look more like a wizard’s beard. The caterpillars move in a single-file line—a procession—and often defoliate oak trees completely. I saw no bare branches or caterpillars in the wooded area where my dog and I found shelter. We cowered in the shade as the temperature rose to a hundred and four degrees.
As I soon learned, you don’t need to touch these caterpillars to experience their sting. The next morning, a galaxy of itchy red bumps and blotches stretched from my shoulder to my hip. Oak processionary caterpillars have not only tufts of visible hairs but also eight hundred thousand microscopic hairs that, according to one study, can be “projected in the air as a fine powder” when a caterpillar is threatened. These hairs are toxic, and they can travel several hundred metres, survive for years on surfaces, and pass through clothing to impale skin. The entomologist Justin O. Schmidt once developed a scale for the pain inflicted by insects, describing a particularly excruciating wasp sting like so: “Torture. You are chained in the flow of an active volcano.” On a scale for itchiness, my Eichenprozessionsspinner rash would outrank all the mosquitoes, spiders, fleas, and midges that had ever bitten into my flesh. I was reminded of bedbug bites that I once suffered on a forearm, after going to a movie theatre in New York City—but the caterpillar stings covered half my body.
The heat wave broke, but the itching lasted another week. I slathered myself in ointments, even after reading a study that said treatment “shows scarce efficacy” for my condition. The main consolation I took from the scientific literature was that it could have been worse. A caterpillar hair in the eyeball can create a crusty yellow nodule that requires professional removal. In some cases, inhaling the hairs may make it difficult to breathe. Guests at a nineteenth-century dinner party suffered “a disgusting, unbearable itching and scratching in the throat” after they feasted on roasted cuckoos that had preyed on Eichenprozessionsspinner. Worst of all was the plight of a forty-six-year-old Italian farm worker who apparently masturbated after handling processionary-caterpillar nests, as described in an old dermatological case study. The scarring from his injuries was so severe that he needed to be circumcised.
Now that oak processionary caterpillars had my attention, I realized that they were not a parochial German pest. Britain has had them since 2006, when London imported infested oaks from the Continent. Lately, the species has been spilling from Germany into Denmark for the first time. The Netherlands, where they have long been present, recorded a doubling of infested oak trees compared with last year, and Switzerland’s forest-research institute called 2026 “an exceptionally strong Eichenprozessionsspinner infestation year.” France has been beset not only with these caterpillars (processionnaire du chêne) but also with a closely related species that has spread northward from the Mediterranean: the processionnaire du pin, or pine processionary caterpillar. A friend of mine, whose university campus in Nuremberg was infested with Eichenprozessionsspinner, told me, “I think nature is trying to destroy us.”
Toxic caterpillars, like deadly heat waves, are becoming a regular part of European summers. Eichenprozessionsspinner love warm, dry, and sunny springs, and the spring of 2026 was the sunniest in Berlin’s history. Heat and solar radiation not only help oak processionary caterpillars survive after they hatch but also make them trigger-happy with their hairs in summer. “The overall trend will likely lean toward an increasing probability of mass outbreaks,” Thomas Sobczyk, a forest engineer who studies the caterpillars and the moths they turn into, told me in an e-mail. “From my perspective, there’s no alternative to coming to terms with the oak processionary moth’s presence in residential areas.”
After I recovered, I visited Volkspark Jungfernheide, one of Berlin’s largest parks and the site of one of the worst outbreaks in the area. It was nearly empty of people. Workers had been vacuuming up caterpillars for weeks. They wore ventilated face masks and, on each hand, multiple gloves that were duct-taped to their sleeves. I no longer viewed these men and women as caricatures of German overzealousness but as frontline heroes who should be applauded from balconies and open windows. Their vacuum cleaners had originally been designed to suck asbestos out of old buildings; a vacuum bag could hold forty pounds of caterpillars and their nests, and a worker could fill three bags a day.
