by Matthew Cobb
With the brilliant success of the ESA Rosetta/Philae mission, this isn’t a day to try and rain on the parade of physics and engineering. BUT BUT BUT, there are also mind-boggling things to be seen down here, too, if you look. This video was posted on FB by Niall McCann, who filmed the caterpillar in Nepal in 2011. My guess is the caterpillar is myrmecophagic – it eats ant grubs – and spends its time inside an ant nest, using chemical camouflage as well as this visual camouflage, to fool the ants. Quite remarkable.
Wonderful! I wonder what the adult form looks like? Google can’t tell me.
Is it confirmed that it eats ant grubs?
There are Lycaenid butterflies whose larvae have various associations with ants. Among them are species that live in ant nests, eating the larvae and pupae. But these do not mimic ants.
🐜
Yum! 🐛
😱
Are we sure some of this mimicry isn’t from some gene transfer, not only animal to animal, but also plant to animal?
Much of it is so good, it’s hard to *gulp* ‘believe’ it’s from natural selection and random mutations alone. Seems like some genes get transferred somehow.
It would be very surprising, like the (busted!) idea that caterpillars evolved from onychophorans by hybridogenesis (which, sadly, irreversibly turned Lynn Margulis and PNAS into laughing stocks). Genes transferred between organisms may be able to produce a protein, but there’s very little chance that they could produce a whole cascade of morphogenesis (converging on the donor’s phenotype) against the host’s vastly different background of other genes and developmental pathways.
Looks like it’s of the genus Stauropus, sometimes called the “lobster prominents”. Truly bizarre caterpillars!
Fancy dress with a little chemical enhancement.. and now, off to the dining room for supper.
Fantastic!
It’s a moth caterpillar of the genus Stauropus – the young caterpillars are incredibly similar to ants, but the older larvae are unmistakable as anything else. They aren’t myrmecophiles, that role being mainly reserved for the Lyacaenid butterflies, but these guys, also called Lobster moths, have their own quirks in that they spray formic acid and do a very imposing defence display when disturbed.