Ella Purnell Documented Her Caterpillar Infestation, And Now I've Unlocked A New Fear
You know Ella Purnell.
She's been all over our TV screens lately in popular shows like Yellowjackets, Fallout, Arcane: League of Legends, Sweetpea, and Star Trek: Prodigy.
But aside from being in some of the coolest adaptations of nerd culture, Ella's latest on-camera adventure has become a newly discovered guilty pleasure — celebrities with insect infestations.
Ella shared that her yard was infested with caterpillars and documented the entire experience, and I can feel them crawling on my skin.
I recently discovered that I'm interested in this topic when former Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay explained in detail that she found an infestation of ants in an unsuspecting location and unlocked a new fear.
On a March 14 episode of The Higher Learning podcast, Rachel shared how after her fire alarm randomly kept going off in the middle of the night, she opened it up to discover a bunch of ants were apparently setting it off. "I twisted open the fire alarm. It rained ants... and eggs. EGGS!" she said. "There was hundreds of eggs. They were nesting in the fire alarm. They were either eggs or larvae. I'm not sure."
For Ella, it wasn't ants but something bigger with more legs. In her Instagram stories, she teased the ordeal, writing, "I don't think any of yall will be able to guess what I spent my day doing today."
@ella_purnell / Instagram: @https://www.instagram.com/ella_purnell/?hl=en
After showing a salad bowl and some tongs, it became clear that she wasn't making a salad when she videoed black caterpillars crawling on the outside wall of her house, in the flowerbed, on her fence, and everywhere.
@ella_purnell / Instagram: @https://www.instagram.com/ella_purnell/?hl=en
She collected as many as she could in the salad bowl to relocate and then provided an update on the soon-to-be butterflies the next day.
Ella learned that the caterpillars eat the leaves of elm trees, revealing that she has a large elm tree in her yard. "So, it turns out the spiny elm caterpillars love elm trees. Who would've thunk it?" she joked.
Sure enough, the caterpillars were crawling all over the tree's bark, but how and why they went over to the house is a mystery I'm not sure I want to solve.
What most likely is a response to people flooding her DMs with unsolicited insectoid factoids, Ella addressed that she is "not killing the caterpillars, and "they are not poisonous as in they could kill you, but their spike are stingers and hurt like ass," based on her experience with them.
She added, "They make really pretty butterflies. I wanted my garden to be a peaceful spring time oasis but instead I have hundreds of stinging caterpillars falling from the sky."
According to this North Carolina State University entomology factsheet, a spiny elm caterpillar can grow to two inches long and transform into the mourning cloak butterfly after being a chrysalis for three weeks.
The butterflies are beautiful, but the way my mild case of trypanophobia is put up, I would've forfeited my house to the creepy caterpillars immediately and returned four weeks later, hoping it was covered with beautiful butterflies.
Now that my algorithm has been certainly tainted by insect infestations, here's the latest video I've come across to satisfy my guilty pleasure. Best Ever Food Review Show host Sonny shared a blooper reel from his visit to a cockroach farm in China. Warning: After watching the video, I'm still searching for ghost roaches crawling on my skin.
Ella's play-by-play even inspired some folks to share their insect infestation stories. Here are a few:
"There was an infestation of caterpillars on my college campus freshman year. They were crawling and dropping from trees. You'd be sitting in class and see one crawl out of someone's hair or all over their backpack. It was so nasty."
— u/Flower-Former
"I travelled to a cottage where there was an infestation of Gypsy Moth Caterpillars. It was absolutely disgusting. My dog was trying to eat them, they were on every tree and underfoot. One peed on my bikini while it was hanging out to dry and it never came out. So disgusting."
— u/Necessary-Emphasis85
"We had a field trip where we went to a state park and we ate lunch under a big oak tree. Caterpillars were dropping on kids left and right. I was so traumatized I went and stood out in the sun where they couldn't get me. Next time I went to the park with my family, I insisted on bringing an umbrella so that I could protect myself. We still made jokes to this day about the umbrella method lol."
— u/iwantahouse
Do you have any wild insect encounters you'd like to share? Tell me about them in the comments. I'm so invested at this point.
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