A beautiful butterfly is able to fool ants into rearing its young by masking them with the ants’ own smell, say researchers.
Caterpillars of the alcon blue butterfly have developed an outer coat that tricks ants into believing the young are its own, duping the ants into carrying the larvae back to their colonies to care for.
But what is more, the ant seems to “recognise” that it is being duped and one population appears to be engaging in an evolutionary arms race with the butterfly, says the team led by David Nash at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
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