State crews and a contractor cleared 45 illegal encampments this week from the slopes of Diamond Head, Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources officials said today.

The sweep was part of regular quarterly cleanup on Division of State Parks lands, according to a DLNR news release. Officials said Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement officers cited three people his morning for being in a closed area of Diamond Head as part of the effort.

“Entry into closed areas on Diamond Head is difficult to enforce without circling the entire crater with an impenetrable barrier,” DOCARE Chief Jason Redulla said in the news release. “The mountain is porous, and there are countless routes for people to use.”

Honolulu police were on stand-by today during the cleanup of makai lands, and state Department of Law Enforcement and multiple service agencies established an intake area in a nearby park, where anyone who was displaced could learn about assistance programs.

DLNR homeless coordinator Pua Aiu said that even if people who have lived on Diamond Head for years wanted to move to a shelter or transitional housing, there are not enough beds to support them all at once.

“There is also a severe lack of beds for people needing mental health services or addiction treatment,” she said.

DLNR officials said there are large amounts of camping gear and buckets of human waste that litter the slopes.

Although DLNR expressed concerns for human health that the waste could flow into the ocean during rain, officials said its crews will leave the buckets due to safety concerns, presumably for the workers.

“We appreciate the community’s patience with this issue,” Redulla said.

He said there are hundreds of places grappling with the same issues, but there are no easy or ready solutions. DLNR’s leaders say regular cleanups will continue to be necessary without “broad-based community support, political will, and funding for more permanent solutions.”

In a remote and lushly forested area of a single mountain range on Oahu, scientists have discovered a carnivorous caterpillar species that makes a living in such a macabre way that they have nicknamed it the “bone collector.”

The caterpillar prowls spider webs to scavenge trapped and helpless victims such as ants, beetles, weevils and flies, the researchers said. The crafty caterpillar camouflages itself from the spider, which would happily eat it, by hiding its body inside a case it fashions from its own silk and adorns it with inedible body parts that it collected from the dead insects.

Through metamorphosis, this caterpillar eventually turns into its adult form, a moth with a brown and white coloration. Caterpillars are the moth’s larval stage, with a segmented and worm-like body.

This is the world’s only known caterpillar to live with and benefit from spiders, according to Daniel Rubinoff, a professor of entomology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and lead author of the study published this week in the journal Science.

Its grisly behavior would seem well suited for a crime novel. But it represents an example of the creative paths that our planet’s living organisms take to survive and thrive.

“They need to hide in a tapestry of bug parts to stay alive in the spider’s lair,” Rubinoff said.

“I think it’s actually a hero,” Rubinoff said. “It truly lives ‘in the lion’s den,’ hiding out with a spider and using the spider’s web to provide it with food and probably shelter. The caterpillar will attack prey that can’t get away but is itself very slow and bumbling, trailing a large (silk) case behind it.”

The caterpillars consume weakened or dead insects they encounter in webs spun by spiders in tree hollows and rock crevices.

“So it’s probably getting the leftovers after the spider has fed,” Rubinoff said.

They even resort to cannibalism, attacking other caterpillars of the same species.

The “Bone Collector” was the nickname of a serial killer in author Jeffery Deaver’s 1997 novel “The Bone Collector” and subsequent 1999 film of the same name.

So how did this caterpillar come to share this notorious nickname?

“I think the term is out there in the ether, and just fit with what these caterpillars are doing. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek because arthropods don’t actually have bones,” Rubinoff said.

Arthropods are a massive assemblage of invertebrates that include insects and spiders, as well as crustaceans.

The researchers said the “bone collector” inhabits a patch of mountain forest spanning just 5.8 square miles (15 square km) in the Waianae mountain range. Rubinoff said this caterpillar has a very precarious existence. Only 62 individuals have been observed in two decades of fieldwork.

“Invasive species are the main threat now. Even in protected areas, Hawaii is losing native species due to invasive species taking over habitats and turning them into biological deserts that look like forests but are largely unavailable to native species,” Rubinoff said.

The caterpillar, a previously unknown species, is a member of a group of moths called Hyposmocoma native to Hawaii that includes hundreds of species and arose about 12 million years ago. The researchers believe the “bone collector” comes from a lineage more than 5 million years old.

The overwhelming majority of caterpillars eat vegetation. Predatory caterpillars globally comprise less than 0.13% of the planet’s nearly 200,000 moth and butterfly species. And among those, the “bone collector” is the only one known to find food the way it does, making it unique among the world’s animals.

“The more we can understand how the world around us works, the better off we will be,” Rubinoff said.