Creepy Crawlies and Sticky Murder Weapons

“Imagine an animal that resembles a caterpillar hunting with a glue gun,” begins the HMNH’s description of a new exhibit, Velvet Worms: A Fierce Hunter with a Secret Weapon. The exhibit — curated by Professor Gonzalo Giribet, Director and Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology — explores the world of the little-known creatures that are the closest relatives to arthropods and have remained relatively unchanged for 300 million years! Harvard Magazine featured the exhibit and work on velvet worms taking place in Giribet's lab.

Visitors to the Arthropods Gallery, where the exhibit lives, will enjoy photographs by Giribet along with two short videos — one showing rare footage of the worms’ unique hunting technique (velvet worms shoot glue-like slime from nozzles to entrap their prey) and another spotlighting his work to determine how velvet worms colonized different environments over time without changing drastically. While visitors can’t touch the specimens on display, they can interact with an oversized 3D model made from a CT scan. Fun fact, velvet worms are actually not worms or caterpillars! They are in their own special category.