WOAY-TV (Oak Hill, WV): Can a certain caterpillar foretell the winter?
Woolly worm’s coloring is a product of how long it has been feeding, its age and species and not its forecast for the winter. The more rain in a growing season…the bigger it will grow. A healthy growing season will lead to narrow red-orange bands in the middle of it. Folklore says this lighter middle color on the worm will result in a mild streak during the middle of winter.
The width of the banding indicates its current or past season’s growth.
Color indicates the age of the wooly worm. The older the wooly worm, the less black (what we interpret as a harsh winter) and more red color.
Few fun facts: Wooly worms can survive in temperatures as low as 90 degrees below zero. Of course, they hibernate during the cold season and they do freeze, but the cells are protected by hemolymph.
They live two to four weeks before becoming moths.
Why the myth that brown bands indicate a mild stretch of winter and black bands cold and snowy? Dr. Howard Curran did a study in 1948 where he went to Bear Mountain, NY with a reporter and counted the brown bands on 15 different wooly worms and made a prediction for the winter that was published in the New York Herald Tribune and was picked by up the national press.
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