the vastness of what we don’t see
helloheather and I caught something on Animal Planet on Sunday that has had my brain twisted up in knots.
In Europe (and Asia), there is a genus of blue butterfly that has a symbiotic relationship with the local species of red ant. Here's how it works:
- Blue butterflies mate.
- Female lays eggs on the stems and leaves of wildflowers
- Eggs hatch and the larvae hang out on the leaves for around three weeks
- larvae fall to the ground and, if found by a red ant, are picked up and brought to the colony.
- Butterfly larvae are kept with the ant larvae and are fed, cleaned, and raised as if it were an ant larvae.
- chrysalis forms, larvae pupate, and emerge as new blue butterflies, quickly leaving the colony.
How does this happen? Why do the ants not turn the fallen larvae into ant food? Near as anyone can tell, the larvae produce the exact same pheromones as ant larvae. To an ant, if it smells like an ant larva, it must be an ant larva. (Though, it must wonder how it got so far out of the colony...). In addition, the butterfly larvae also mimic the sounds ant larvae make. It completely fools the ants.
Symbiotic relationships are not uncommon in nature, but here's where this one takes a twist.
The entire colony of ants treat these butterfly larvae as one of their own because it smells and sounds exactly like one of their own. But someone else, without even looking, can spot the fakery: a wasp. And it uses this information to climb into a colony and inject its own larva inside the larva of the blue butterfly, where it feeds once the chrysalis is formed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4460030.stm
Rather than re-type pretty much what the BBC article states, I'll just link to it. But what should be noted here is that this species of wasp (Ichneumon eumerus) can find, in a field of hundreds of ant colonies, the ONE colony that contains butterfly larva. Simply amazing.
This is just one story from a show called "Life in the Undergrowth" narrated by David Attenborough.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000EBD9W6.
We watched a couple others and were equally fascinated.