Hi ,
Things are not always what they seem. Sometimes, a seemingly harmless butterfly can
have a very interesting past. That is a case with a particular species found in Europe and parts of Asia.
The caterpillar of this species has fooled a worker ant into thinking that it is a queen ant. It has accomplished this through the use of a pheromone and also the sound it makes when forcing air back out of its body. The ant will pick up
this caterpillar and take it into the nest, thinking it is a queen. The caterpillar will continue to produce the pheromone and the sound in the hopes that the other ants will accept it as a queen. They very often do. When that happens, the caterpillar goes to the next stage of its amazing journey!
It will now employ one of two strategies.
It will either use the "cuckoo strategy" or the "predator strategy". With the cuckoo strategy, the caterpillar will continue to mimic the sound of a larval queen ant, and the ants will then feed the caterpillar and even give it preferential treatment over the other larval ants! This strategy often elevates the caterpillar to a high status, so much so that the ants will feed their own larva to the caterpillar, and even rescue it first in the event of danger.
The predator strategy is basically just that. Once the ants have accepted the caterpillar as a queen, then it is free to go about its business in the ant colony, which is to eat the ant larva!
The system is
not foolproof, though. If the caterpillar does not perform the mimicry perfectly, the ants sometimes become suspicious and will kill it and eat it. Or, if food has become scarce in the ant colony, the ants might actually turn on the caterpillar, and make a meal out of it.
If the caterpillar survives, especially the first 10 days, and becomes
large enough to pupate, it will turn into a chrysalis and eventually emerge from the nest as an adult butterfly.
To see a sample of this amazing, creative design from the Designer, click on the link below...
