James Stewart, a lab manager at the University of Maine, and graduate student Emma Irvine collect nests of browntail moth caterpillar pupae from an oak tree on the UMaine campus in Orono on June 26.

Cindy Burkhardt had been watching a sphinx moth caterpillar in her garden for several days, but then it disappeared. Soon thereafter, she saw another trundling across a dirt road on Rabbit Mountain.

As a caterpillar, a grass skipper butterfly is an architect. It builds its home by weaving skeins of silk, which the caterpillar uses to fold shut a blade of grass. After growing up inside this “grass ...

If you were small enough to fit inside an ant nest, you would hear it as much as you would see it. The walls shiver with tiny ...