Inside the Hacking World of Pregnant Lady Beetles

Someday a more ambitious writer than me will write a book about biological hacking, and the biological/evolutionary basis for modern techno-hacking. There’s nothing inherently human about hacking, at least in the very crude sense of hacking being useful or disruptive interceptions of communications among others. Species all the way down the food chain communicate in myriad different ways and for different reasons, mostly having to do with survival and procreation. And, also in the interests of survival and procreation — which are really the

only

interests — animals hack those communications. Or, at the very least beetles do, intercepting pheromone signals released by ants to discover the most ideal egg-laying ground.

This is according to a new paper out from the University of Michigan, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution. Ants are, of course, awesome at communication and have really impressive systems of it, like the internet of the insect world, if you will. But science hasn’t studied in too great of detail yet how other animals use those systems to their own advantage.

Ant communication is based on pheromones released by ants from a wide variety of glands, and then detected by other ant’s antennae. Sometimes those pheromones are just used to leave trails to and from food (or wherever); sometimes they’re used to confuse enemy ants, making them fight amongst themselves; or, sometimes, ants release pheromones as a warning to other ants. It’s this last pheromone that’s of particular interest to predatory lady beetles.

A variety of ant known as the Azteca ant has an especially horrifying predator in the phorid fly. Said fly is parasitic and uses the heads of Azteca ants in which to lay eggs. The fly larvae then develop inside the ant’s head, which falls off when the adult, mature fly emerges. The ants, naturally, have a warning pheromone for this. And when that pheromone is released, the entire ant colony basically freezes in ant terror, shifting into a catatonic state. In this lull, the pregnant lady beetle lays her eggs, which would otherwise come under attack from the ants.

It’s an impressive little drama they all have going there, but let’s not forget about the phorid, now left with nowhere to deposit its eggs. Will natural selection teach those things to hack too?

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

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