Transcript

Picture yourself on the ground, patiently waiting. You dropped from your plant to place yourself there, defenseless. What does a chubby butterfly caterpillar have to do on the ground like this? You are not ready to pupate, and there is no food for you here.

[Central European soundscapes fades in. Insects are constantly chirping in the background, and different bird species are filling the air with their calls.]

Hi and welcome back to the Insect Insights for a second season and some more chill insect stories to relax and wonder. If you like this podcast, you can subscribe, leave a review and even an insect question, on spotify or on the website. You will find the links in the shownotes, along with useful sources for this story. I am Max, your host, and I hope you are ready to dive into insect knowledge for another insight!

Well, you are not any caterpillar, you are a Lycaenidae, and you have a very special plan to finish your development. Feeding yourself in autonomy is not part of it. You have a secret skill allowing you to get someone else to take care of you: you know how to befriend ants! This is the reason of your laying there, you are waiting to be picked up by an ant. Clever grub!

And lucky for you, an ant arrives. A forager from a neighboring red ant colony, looking for food. Insects to prey on, aphids to farm, these ants are quite generalist. And if it wasn’t for your special skill, they would probably try to eat you too.

But as the ant comes by you and starts patting you gently with its antennae, it is not recognizing you as potential food. To the ant, you smell like something precious. Something nice. Something to protect, maybe. You smell like something the ant should carry home and cherish. That’s your ticket to enter the colony safely. Safely, and even escorted in!

Convinced to have found a small treasure to bring back home, the ant picks you up and starts walking. The embrace of its mandibles is soft and careful. After walking through a few meters of meadow, you two arrive at the nest entrance, passing the careful inspection of guards, you are then carried in a brood chamber, where you are put next to piles of chubby little ant babies. Plump larvae, many of them smaller than you, and delicious looking…

Surely the adult ants around will not mind if you start helping yourself to a larva or two. Or three. They are the only thing around for you to eat, anyways! And sure, it’s not very nice to eat your guest’s baby as soon as you’re invited in, but luckily for you, you are all prepared to get away with it. You know how to make yourself smell like their babes, and sound like an ant queen larva, to get the best treatment possible!

Even if the ants notice you eating other larvae, they probably will not do anything about it. You are a future queen to them! If you knew how to ask, you could even get the ants to feed you. That might even work better than eating their brood… But well, only some cousins of yours possess this skill, so the ant larvae will have to do for you.

No matter which source of food you can access, at some point you will have to leave this cozy nest. Indeed, you are a caterpillar, and that implies a second, very different, part of your life, as a butterfly!

You will spend the winter like this, protected from the cold by the ants, and protected from the ants by your tricks. At the beginning of spring, having eaten enough, having maybe molted a few times, you will be ready to pupate into a chrysalis, the transition state between larva and adult. But once you emerge, things will get more… Agitated.

You will really have to make a run for the exit, as ants do not treat intruders kindly… The ones they can detect at least. And they will surely be able to identify your adult self as a trespasser, your chemical tricks won’t be active anymore.

Sources

Fiedler, K. (with Zoologisches Forschungsinstitut und Museum Alexander Koenig). (1991). Systematic, evolutionary, and ecological implications of myrmecophily within the Lycaenidae (Insecta: Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea). Zoologisches Forschungsinst. und Museum Alexander König.

Parmentier, T. (2020). Guests of Social Insects. In C. Starr (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Social Insects (pp. 1–15). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90306-4_164-1