A Najomtien housing project has been overrun with caterpillars that are eating their way through the neighborhood’s golden shower trees.
Hundreds of thousands of the caterpillars have reduced many of the trees at Baan Euarthron to bare branches. But they’ve also become a pest to people, covering cars, the walls of houses and even get inside homes, crawling into the ear of one sleeping child at night. It’s little consolation that residents that, in a week or so, most of them will become butterflies.
The butterflies, in fact, will make the problem worse, laying a single egg on the edge of a cassia tree leaf. In several days, that egg will hatch into a caterpillar and the cycle begins again.
As of April 27, there has been no effort to spray the housing project with pesticide.