THEY wouldn’t wow a karaoke club, but parasitic caterpillars belt out a convincing cover version of a tune irresistible to red ants. The discovery may explain why duped ants treat the larvae “as if they were the holiest of holiest, the pinnacle of power, the queen ant”, says at the University of Oxford.
Young Maculinea rebeli caterpillars gorge on leaves. Before their metamorphosis, they drop to the forest floor and secrete ant-like chemicals which trick worker ants into treating it like one of them. The ants ferry the fattening larva to their colony and start bringing it food.
Not convinced that chemicals alone could explain the caterpillars’ royal treatment, Thomas’s team recorded the sounds of the ants and the larvae. They found the sounds shared qualities, such as frequency.
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Worker ants listening to recordings of their own songs “tapped [the speakers] with their antennae with interest”, says Thomas. But both their queen’s song and that of a larva made them crowd around the speaker and refuse to budge (Science, ).
“This potentially solves the mystery of how they mimic the queen, even though they don’t smell like the queen,” says at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
