Butterflies find ways to get ants to care for them

By Rachel Lin and Jake Chung / Staff reporter, with staff writer





The first evidence on vibration-based communication between long-banded silverline butterflies and acrobat ants was detailed in a paper coauthored by Taiwanese researchers and published in Scientific Reports on Friday last week.

Many lycaenid butterflies in Taiwan have developed organs to attract ants to tend to them, by providing food through dorsal nectary organs or mimicking chemical signals, with one notable exception — the long-banded silverline, National Taiwan Normal University professor Hsu Yu-feng (徐堉峰) said on Thursday.

After observing the long-banded silverline butterfly pupae and larvae attracting a similar number of attendant ants, Hsu said that he and the other coauthors developed the hypothesis that the pupae and larvae were able to produce specific vibrational calls to attract the the acrobat ant.

National Chung Hsing University’s Department of Entomology Professor Yang Man-miao, left, stands next to a poster announcing a speech on butterflies delivered by National Taiwan Normal University’s School of Life Science Professor Hsu Yu-feng, right, in an undated picture taken in the National Chung Hsing University campus in Taichung. Photo courtesy of National Taiwan Normal University

Recordings made during the experiment showed that the larvae made three kinds of calls — which the researchers designated as types A, B and C — while pupae could emit one, all of which were very similar to calls emitted by acrobat ants, Hsu said.

Type A calls and pupal calls appeared to induce three behaviors in the ants (aggregation, touching of antennae and guarding), while type B and C calls were correlated with ant aggregation and guarding behavior, he said.

The experiments showed that benevolent behavior in the ants increased significantly from the calls.

The researchers have not discerned how the larvae make the calls, but experiments could test whether vibration-based calls were species-specific, the paper showed.