Empire of Ants by Susanne Foitzik

Author:Susanne Foitzik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2021-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

eating—and not getting eaten

The ants’ less thrill-seeking guests take great pains to remain almost invisible to their hosts by, for example, holing up in unused corners of the nest, or by wearing thick armor, impenetrable to the ants’ strong jaws. The ant bag beetle Clytra laeviuscula adopts this strategy in a particularly unseemly way by laying its eggs right at the entrance of the ants’ nest and then defecating all over them. For some reason, the ants gather up the eggs and carry them into the nest, where the larvae soon coat themselves in a hard layer of excrement. This allows them to effortlessly withstand attacks from ants while also feeding not just on waste but also their hosts’ offspring. An ant bag beetle larva will rampage through a nest for two years or more before it pupates and finally leaves as an adult beetle.

The most effective method for surviving inside an ants’ nest, however, might be to bewitch the ants with the right perfume. The rove beetle Lomechusa pubicollis is an expert in this regard. To first of all find its way into the nest, it seeks an encounter with the common red ant Myrmica rubra and drums on one of the workers with its antennae. Once it has awakened her interest, the beetle sticks out its bottom. This is equipped with a gland that produces a secretion that mollifies the ant, causing her to forget her aggression. From this point onward, the rove beetle need not worry about being eaten. Instead, it employs another trick: It presents the ant with the openings of two other glands on its bottom, which Bert Hölldobler has christened “adoption glands.” Once the worker gets a whiff of these, she mistakes the beetle for a confused larva from her own colony and promptly carries it to the nesting chamber. It is then that this ungrateful fraudster goes to town, feeding on its hosts’ eggs and larvae.

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