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 B: Kind of.

So, according to the plus one 2014 paper, this is the title. Variation in butterfly larval acoustics as a strategy to infiltrate and exploit host ant colony resources.

[00:01:10] Speaker C: Ooh, that's quite the title.

[00:01:12] Speaker B: It's so much title. There are about 10,000 different buggy critters out there faking their way into ant hills to snack on ants.

[00:01:19] Speaker C: That's a lot.

[00:01:20] Speaker A: Poor ants. I know there's a lot of them.

[00:01:23] Speaker C: But that's not an excuse. There's so many.

[00:01:27] Speaker B: We could eat a couple.

[00:01:28] Speaker C: It'll be fine.

[00:01:33] Speaker A: Okay, you're right. That's true.

[00:01:34] Speaker D: Yeah.

[00:01:35] Speaker B: Of all of these butterflies in the matulina family, they're super cute. They're little blue butterflies. The one I'm go...

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