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Let\u2019s get gross and horrible this week! Are there any bugs with so much venom they could kill you? What would happen if you ate 5,000 moth digestive tracts? Why am I even talking about this stuff? Listen and find out! Thanks to Grady and Tania for today\u2019s topic suggestions!\n\nThe giant silkworm moth caterpillar. Do not touch. No seriously, don't! You might d i e\n\n\n\nThe southern flannel moth and its larva, a puss caterpillar. Fuzzy, yes, but don't pet the caterpillar:\n\n \n\nA luna moth and its caterpillar. It will not kill you:\n\n \n\nA bullet ant. Look at those chompers!\n\n\n\nThe white-spotted assassin bug. At least you can see it coming:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nThis week\u2019s episode is a suggestion from Grady, who also sent several other really good suggestions we\u2019ll hopefully get to soon. The one we\u2019re looking at this week is poisonous bugs! And because another listener, Tania, suggested we cover moths, we\u2019ll also make sure to talk about a lot of poisonous or venomous moths too.\n\nTechnically, if an insect is poisonous that means it will make you sick if you eat it. If an insect bites or stings you and it injects poison into the wound, it\u2019s referred to as venomous. But you can call both poisonous because everyone will know what you mean. Also, you would probably get sick if you ate a venomous bug too, now that I think about it.\n\nYou might think I\u2019m joking when I talk about eating bugs, but in many parts of the world people do. If you think about it, it\u2019s no weirder than eating shrimp, lobster, oysters, or eggs. Remember that humans are omnivores, and that means we will eat just about anything. Those things don\u2019t all have to be cookies and peanut butter sandwiches, although I haven\u2019t had my lunch yet and if I had to choose between a PB&J with maybe a couple of Thin Mints afterwards, I\u2019d choose that over a big bowl of deep-fried crickets. But lots of people would choose the crickets. It all depends on what you\u2019re used to and what\u2019s considered acceptable in your culture.\n\nBut even in areas where people eat lots of insects, they don\u2019t eat every kind of insect. Some really are poisonous because they eat plants that contain toxins and store those toxins in the body. The monarch butterfly caterpillar eats milkweed, which contains poisons that can harm the heart, so don\u2019t eat monarch butterflies. But because insects are generally quite small, the toxins one insect can hold aren\u2019t usually enough to make you really sick unless you eat a whole bunch of them. That\u2019s why children in some parts of Italy can eat a particular moth without dying even though it contains the deadly poison cyanide.\n\nYou know what? Let\u2019s start with this moth, because what the heck, Italian children. Why are you eating these moths anyway, and why are you not dying of cyanide poisoning?\n\nThere are a number of closely related moth species that children in the Carnia region of Italy traditionally eat. The moth\u2019s wingspan is only about an inch wide, or 30 millimeters. It\u2019s most common in the Italian Alps and it flies around during the day, which makes it easy to find and catch. Its body is grayish, and one pair of its wings are greenish or gray with red spots, while the other pair of wings is mostly red. There\u2019s also a variety with yellow wing markings instead of red. The reason it has such bright colors is because it stores a liquid containing cyanide in its digestive system, and the bright colors tell potential predators to leave it alone, it\u2019s poisonous.\n\nThe problem is, the moth\u2019s digestive system also contains sugars called glucosides, which makes it taste sweet. And before you laugh at little Italian children catching moths to eat because they\u2019re sweet-tasting, think about how much effort you may have put into extracting a tiny bead of nectar from honeysuckle blossoms.\n\nBut honeysuckle doesn\u2019t contain cyanide. Why don\u2019t those little moth-eating kids get sick?