The Wooly Bear Rule

YES, IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN!  Driving down country roads is a HAIR-RAISING CHALLENGE at the moment as motorists swerve wildly to avoid flattening all the Wooly Bear caterpillars crossing the pavement.  The other day I counted 17 of them on a 15-mile trip.  I'm pretty sure I didn't kill a single one, thank you very much.

As you make one of these trips down the road, you catch yourself, and the other motorists, peering avidly at the little critters as they go undulating across the asphalt.  Not just to avoid hitting them, mind you.  We also want to check out the MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE of this adorable animal, the red midsection. 

LEGEND HAS IT that the redder the wooly bears, the milder the winter is going to be.  And those winters after the little guys appear in with jackets that are mostly black -- or, egad, 100% black -- are supposed to be BRUTAL, with heavy snowfall and sub-zero temperatures week after week. 

RESPONSIBLE SCIENTISTS claim that there is no relationship between the caterpillars' coloration and the severity of the weather.  But riddle me this:  can they say that without conducting a formal STUDY of the phenomenon?  Not just a snapshot-in-time study, either.  To really know the answer, they'd need to do a well-designed LONGITUDINAL study that matches up the weather to the woolies every year for DECADES.  Nothing less would satisfy the rigorous demands of true scientific inquiry.

DO YOU REALLY THINK ANYONE'S BOTHERED TO DO THIS?  I'd like to see the research grant applications, personally; they'd be good for a laugh.  The resulting articles in Nature or Entomologist Monthly might be, too.

THIS MUCH I KNOW.  If one Wooly Bear is blacker than usual, ALL OF THEM ARE.  This is a fact universally acknowledged and it must have something to do with the origin of the legend.  I have no idea what determines this.  They're generalist diners, and maybe they all laid their eggs on cherry trees that year instead of locust, creating blacker or redder offspring.  But, even if that's true, I suspect that what they ate all summer must have a little something to do with the weather, no?  And if the weather affects their diet and that changes their colors, then..?  ALL I'M SAYING HERE is that nothing happens without a reason.  How can Wooly Bear caterpillars NOT be affected by the weather?  They don't even have access to air conditioning in many cases.

And nature -- especially tracking the effects of one factor on another -- can be a slippery thing to dope out correctly.  That's true in even our current, radically simplified ecosystem, consisting mostly of Bradford pear trees and "Stella D'Oro" daylilies planted around the edges of our Kentucky bluegrass lawns.  First you have to factor in temperature, precipitation, food sources, and everything else like that.  And we also need to take into account the Wooly Bear's predators, diseases, and pesticide and fungicide exposure, not to mention those rotten kids who pluck them off bushes and skewer them on fish hooks or trap them in jars to die.  Do you know whether they prefer the redder ones or the blacker ones to victimize?  Neither do I.

And then there are other confounding factors, like the inability of human scientists to think of all the factors they need to take into account.  That kind of thing really fcrews up your raw data, and from there you still have to see and interpret all that information correctly.  Rotsa ruck coming up with conclusions that aren't a bunch of B.S. under those conditions.

Which brings us to the biggest confounding factor of all:  B.S., which stands for Belief Systems.  One thing I DEFINITELY know about the legend of the Wooly Bear is that it is just like any other part of the belief structure of Homo sapiens sapiens -- it doesn't just influence reality.  It CAUSES things to happen.  As we say in my line of business, PERCEPTION IS REALITY. 

A couple of years ago I became fully aware of this phenomenon as it applies to the Wooly Bear. Those little guys were black as the Ace of Spades that year, with a mere hint of red around the middle that said BUCKLE YOUR SEATBELT:  WINTER IS COMING TO KICK YOUR TAIL.   So, hey, I buckled my seatbelt.  I was interested to see how bad the winter would be because I had never seen such a radical shift in the color of the caterpillars before.  I put on new snow tires, added Dry-Gas to my tank and made a new, warmer scarf...

...and winter that year was only so-so.  There were more puddles than ice on the roads and not a single snow day for the kids all season.  Privately, I caught myself thinking:  do they have it backwards?  Is a redder Wooly Bear year a sign of a meaner winter?  Then I shook that off, and made myself go back to observing.

I finally got what I think was my real answer when spring sprang.  The same people who had been predicting dire weather based on the black Wooly Bears were all still there.  They looked back on the winter, shook their heads, and talked grimly about what a horrible winter it had been...And there was the answer.  The Order they'd imposed on Chaotic, unpredictable nature with the Wooly Bear was more important than being able to sit back and enjoy a fairly mild winter.