Alcon blue butterfly caterpillars trick ants to take them into their nest with

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In evolutionary terms: if the butterflies want to stay where they are, living the high life at the ants? Local adaptation such as this has serious implications for the conservation of the butterflies, the researchers say. If a butterfly has evolved to specifically invade the nest of a local ant, it may be chemically different enough to be recognized as a fake by the slightly different ants in other areas.

Although the large blue butterfly was successfully reintroduced to the United Kingdom in the s, other reintroductions have failed. It may be that in those cases the ants saw through the disguise, and the would-be nest hijackers instead became dinner.

Nash, D. Science , Lythgoe, K. Trends Ecol. Article Google Scholar. Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Reprints and Permissions. Cressey, D. The battle of the butterflies and the ants. Nature Download citation. Published : 03 January Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative.

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. Download PDF. Parasitic caterpillars show local evolution as never before.

You have full access to this article via your institution. I'll take this one home: an ant is tricked into caring for a butterly caterpillar. Credit: courtesy of David Nash. Intruder alert! Running to stay still. Conservation consequences. References Nash, D.

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The lycaenidae is one of the largest butterfly families. One reason for the success of this family of butterflies is that their caterpillars and pupae often have some sort of association with ants.

Most of the lycaenidae that associate with ants have a mutualistic relationship with them. However the Alcon blue and other large blue butterflies butterflies in the genus Maculinea are parasites of ant colonies. The female Alcon blue left generally has more prominent black spots on, and a broader black border to her wings, but this is quite variable.

Little is known of how Alcon blues find and choose their mates. Male Alcon blues emerge slightly earlier in the year than females, and males can often be seen flying backward and forward over areas with ant nests from which females may emerge. It is quite common to see mating pairs where the female has not finished expanding her wings, so it is likely that females are often mated soon after they emerge, and have little opportunity to assess and choose particular mates.

Both sexes have underwings with a distinctive pattern of black spots. The Alcon blue, like all the large blue butterflies, is rare.

It is classified as endangered or vulnerable to extinction on most countries in western Europe. Luckily the populations in Denmark are healthier than most of those in the rest of Europe.

Egg laying Females of the Alcon blue lay their eggs on the flowers of the Marsh Gentian, Gentiana pneumonanthe. The Marsh Gentian is now quite rare throughout Europe, and is considered endangered in several countries.

It grows on wet heathlands. Large blue butterflies are unusual in that their caterpillars hatch through the base of the egg and burrow straight into the flower head. Inside the flower head the caterpillar will develop through the first three instars in about two weeks.

The caterpillar feeds on the flower tissue and developing seeds during this time. The picture to the left shows a third-instar caterpillar. The caterpillar grows very little during its time inside the Gentian plant.

When it moults for the third time and becomes a fourth-instar caterpillar it is only mm long, and weighs only mg. At this stage the caterpillar will chew a hole in the plant from the inside and crawl out from the flower head.

Caterpillar emergence The fourth instar caterpillar emerges from the gentian flower shortly after it has moulted. The newly-moulted caterpillar chews a hole in the flower-head from the inside out and crawls outside. As the picture on the right shows, several caterpillars can develop in and emerge from the same gentian flower. The caterpillar then crawls onto the bracts of the flower, or onto the leaves of the gentian, and lowers itself to the ground on a silken thread.

The picture above is a scanning electron micrograph of a fourth-instar caterpillar that has just emerged from a gentian. The caterpillar is quite difference in appearance from the third-instar caterpillar. It has almost no hairs on the upper surface and has a few special glands here that the third instar caterpillar lacks.

The caterpillar will wait on the ground until it is discovered by a worker ant. The caterpillars usually leave the plant during the morning or evening, when the chances of drying out are quite low, but the chance of being discovered by an ant are high.

Adoption If the caterpillar is discovered by the right sort of ant it will be adopted into the ant nest. If the caterpillar is discovered by a red ant an ant in the genus Myrmica , then it will go through a process known as adoption. If any other type of ant discovers the caterpillar, however, it will be treated like any other caterpillar, which usually means being eaten. During the adoption procedure, a Myrmica ant will touch the caterpillar all over with her antennae.

During this time the caterpillar may secrete a droplet of a sweet secretion from a special gland on its back, which the ant drinks. After a while the caterpillar will flatten the rear or middle of its body, and the ant will pick the caterpillar up and carry it away.

The ant will carry the caterpillar back to the ant nest and place it among the ant larvae. Growth and development in the ant nest.

Once inside the ant nest, the caterpillars are fed by the ants much as if they were their own larvae. Worker ants regurgitate liquid food that the caterpillars drink. The ants seem to prefer feeding caterpillars to feeding their own larvae, so that fewer ant larvae can develop. In the laboratory the caterpillars will also eat ant larvae directly, and this probably also happens in nature some other large blue butterflies live entirely by eating ant brood when they are inside the ant nest.

Although caterpillars will be adopted by any Myrmica ant species that finds them, they are only seem able to survive in the nests of one or two species of ant. The Alcon blue is unusual among the large blue butterflies in that the species of ant in the nests of which it can survive is different in different parts of Europe. At the moment we are carrying out research at the Universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus into why this should be.

If caterpillars are adopted into a nest of the right species of ant they will grow rapidly, increasing in weight about times in their first month in the nest. They will stay in the nest throughout the autumn, winter and spring, and will turn into pupae in the early summer. Compare the size of the caterpillars with the ants on the picture above! These insects make a particularly good model for such arms races because their geographical ranges overlap in a fractured mosaic.

Both gentians and butterflies are rare but the ants are common, meaning that only a small proportion of colonies are ever parasitized. The result is a series of evolutionary hotspots where the two species wage adaptive war against each other in contrast to the many coldspots where colonies never encounter the deceptive butterflies.

The chemical coats of populations that were victimised by Alcon blues were significantly different from each other, while those of uninfected colonies were much the same.

Those that had encountered the parasitic moochers were adapting by shifting their own smells to distinguish their own from the caterpillars. But when Nash looked at the second host species, M. All the populations smelled very similar regardless of whether they were parasitized or not. The difference lies in the mating patterns of the two ant species. Any new mutations for parasite resistance are quickly diluted by the flow of genes from these non-resistant neighbours.

Nash thinks that the butterfly uses M. To back this up, he found at least one site where M. He thinks that these are populations that won their arms race — they once had to contend with the parasite but adapted so well that it abandoned them as hosts. Reference: Nash, D. Science, , DOI: All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email. Go Further. Magazine The Big Idea Are these boots made from endangered elephants? Magazine Proof See these chickens go from coop to catwalk.

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