🐞 #6 answers: Creepy Crawlies Day

Butterflies taste with their feet, using sensors that tell them whether a leaf is good food for their caterpillars.

A female 'tastes' a leaf before laying eggs on it.

“A butterfly's sense of taste is coordinated by chemoreceptors on the tarsi, or feet, which work only on contact, and are used to determine whether an egg-laying insect's offspring will be able to feed on a leaf before eggs are laid on it.”

Leafcutter ants don't eat the leaves they carry home; they use them to farm a fungus in their nests.

The ants eat the fungus, and the fungus gets fed with fresh leaves.

“Leafcutter ants are several species of fungus-growing ants that share the behaviour of cutting leaves which they carry back to their nests to farm fungus.”

Spiders aren't insects: they have eight legs where insects have six, and they don't have antennae either.

They belong to the arachnids, along with scorpions and ticks.

“Unlike insects, spiders do not have antennae.”

Weight for weight, spider silk is stronger than steel, though not quite as strong as Kevlar.

Some spiders make several kinds of silk for different jobs.

“Weight for weight, silk is stronger than steel, but not as strong as Kevlar.”

Periodical cicadas spend 13 or 17 years underground, then emerge all together in tremendous numbers.

Coming out in huge numbers means predators can't possibly eat them all.

“In the spring of their 13th or 17th year, mature cicada nymphs emerge between late April and early June (depending on latitude), synchronously and in tremendous numbers.”

A male dung beetle of one species can pull 1,141 times its own body weight.

For a person, that's like pulling six double-decker buses full of people.

“The strength of dung beetles is well-known; male Onthophagus taurus can pull 1,141 times their own body weight, the equivalent of an average person pulling six double-decker buses full of people.”

Honeybees do a 'waggle dance' to tell their nestmates the direction and distance of good patches of flowers.

The dance is a figure of eight, and the waggling part carries the directions.

“By performing this dance, successful foragers can share information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new nest-site locations with other members of the colony.”

Silk comes from silkworm cocoons, and China's emperors tried to keep the way it was made a secret.

Keeping it secret kept silk a Chinese monopoly for centuries.

“The Chinese emperors strove to keep knowledge of sericulture secret to maintain the Chinese monopoly.”

The bombardier beetle defends itself with a chemical spray that heats up to nearly 100°C, the boiling point of water.

Two chemicals mix in a chamber in its abdomen and react violently, with a loud pop.

“This reaction is very exothermic, and the released energy raises the temperature of the mixture to near 100 °C, vaporizing about a fifth of it.”

Bogong moths migrating across Australia steer by the starry night sky, using it as a compass to find their way.

Each spring they fly up to 1,000 km to cool caves in the Australian Alps they have never visited. Dung beetles use the Milky Way too, but only to roll their dung in a straight line.

“Here we show that Bogong moths use the starry night sky as a compass to distinguish between specific geographical directions, thereby navigating in their inherited migratory direction towards their distant goal.”