Introducing the Curious Caddisfly

Photo by Waldemarpaetz [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

This past weekend Seattle enjoyed gorgeous weather, and my wife and I took a kid from our church hiking near a local creek. Along the way, we stopped multiple times to examine the creek, and found strange arthropod-like creatures that seemed to live inside hard cylindrical shells that almost perfectly matched the color of the surrounding rock and gravel in the creek bed. We observed hundreds, if not thousands, of these strange cyl...