305: Deadly Animal Mimics Brain Junk

It's easy to believe that a snake might be a deadly mimic. But butterflies that start life as carnivorous caterpillars? Oh heck yeah!







Show Notes:



YouTube BBC: Ants Adopt a Caterpillar



YouTube Entomological Society of America: Ants and Blues



The Pattern of Social Parasitism in Maculinea teleius Butterfly Is Driven by the Size and Spatial Distribution of the Host Ant Nests



Entomology Today: Carnivorous Caterpillars Fool Ants by Sounding like Queens



PLOS One: Variation in Butterfly Larval Acoustics as a Strategy to Infiltrate and Exploit Host Ant Colony Resources



Scientific American: Actual audio of the caterpillar mimicking an ant



Avian deception using an elaborate caudal lure in Pseudocerastes urarachnoides (Serpentes: Viperidae)



Herpetological.org Pseudocerastes urarachnoides: the ambush specialist (great pictures of the viper!)



Discover: Meet the Snake







Transcript:



00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to brain junk. I'm Amy Barton.



[00:00:05] Speaker B: And I'm Trace Kerr. And today is everything you never knew you wanted to know about deadly animal mimics.



[00:00:13] Speaker A: I want to know a lot about that.



[00:00:15] Speaker B: Well, I have two. It's double header. I can't make up my mind about subjects lately and I'm just going to mash it together.



[00:00:21] Speaker C: Bonus.



[00:00:24] Speaker B: So the first one, I'm going to give you a little scenario. You have a child pretending to be a queen, infiltrating a city, deceiving soldiers into taking care of her, all the while eating the real queen's children.



[00:00:37] Speaker C: Oh, my word.



[00:00:38] Speaker A: That sounds like a marvel plot.



[00:00:40] Speaker C: It does, right?



[00:00:40] Speaker B: Horror movie, Sci-Fi it's not. It's the real life of the large blue butterfly caterpillar.



[00:00:47] Speaker A: I was sure we were going down an ant road.



[00:00:50] Speaker C: Well, wow.



[00:00:52] Speaker