Do Polar Bears Get Lonely?: And Answers to 100 Other Weird and Wacky Questions About How the World Works by New Scientist

Author:New Scientist
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science, Trivia, Reference
ISBN: 0805089888
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2009-04-27T05:00:00+00:00

For each dead bird there are, fortunately, plenty of burying beetles of the family Silphidae that will promptly fly to the scene from a considerable distance away, attracted by the enticing smells. So tough is competition for these tasty morsels that sometimes beetles carry mites on their bodies that upon arrival promptly alight on the corpse and start ridding it of the eggs of blowflies or other faster-eating scavengers (see http://bugguide.net/node/view/5957/bgimage). This buys the beetles some time while they scrape away under the bird, which will soon sink into the ground and disappear.

Once they have located a corpse, a couple of beetles will soon mate and start preparing the nest for their offspring. With the help of mouth and anal secretions they make a “brood mass” with the bird’s flesh and tend it so that by the time their eggs hatch it will still be in pristine condition for their larvae.

During the early stages of the larvae’s life the parents will feed them with regurgitated bird flesh much as birds do for their nestlings. This form of parental care is very rare among such nonsocial insects, but burying beetles will look after their larvae until they are ready to pupate in the soil. By that stage there will be not much left of the bird at all.

Maria Fremlin

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