Living organisms have evolved conserved 'catchers' for detecting and handling molecular patterns from invading viruses. Slavik et al. and Holleufer et al. recently identified cyclic GMP-AMP (cGAMP) synthase (cGAS)-like receptors that detect double-stranded viral RNA in Drosophila. cGAS-like receptors constitute a new expanding family of pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) for viral nucleic acids.