Share this article

 Email

 Print

 

Republish this article

The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.

More
Science & Technology

Permafrost microbe loves salty Arctic ‘veins’

So, it’s not parasitic mind control?

First boson laser could save power

This quick visual test predicts IQ

Citizen scientists tag bug collections online

‘Dynamo’ accounts for Sun’s weather cycle

Violent weather on Neptune, Uranus doesn’t run deep

Do bird brains trade songs for spatial skills?

Bendy nano-sensors detect infrared light

Animals that choose to eat in the presence of a predator run the risk of being eaten themselves, so they often go into a defensive mode and pay a physical penalty for the lack of nutrients—they increase metabolism and stop growing or developing.

Hornworm caterpillars eat 30 to 40 percent less when threatened by stink bugs but weigh the same as their non-threatened counterparts.

“It was a little puzzling. If you’re going to shut down, there should be a cost associated with that,” says Ian Kaplan, assistant professor of entomology at Purdue University, who studied the caterpillars as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. “We usually think that you can either grow really fast and not defend yourself, or defend yourself but pay a physical penalty. That wasn’t happening here.”

Threatened hornworm caterpillars adapt to increase the efficiency by which they convert food into energy. They also increase the amount of nitrogen they extract from their food and their bodies’ lipid content. In the first three days of the study, the caterpillars weighed the same and reached the next developmental stage faster than caterpillars eating in safety.

Over the long term, however, their body compositions change and their ability to turn food into energy is reduced in later developmental stages. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal that hornworm caterpillars are the first insect species shown to delay the physical penalties associated with protecting themselves from predators.

Hornworm caterpillars eat tomato, tobacco, pepper, and other crops. Understanding their physiology may lead to better ways to control the pests, Kaplan says.

The scientists found an interesting way to work around a major roadblock in studying the physiological changes in the caterpillars exposed to predators. They “disarmed” the predators.

Stink bugs normally use their mouthparts to stab the caterpillar and suck out its internal parts. But the scientists removed part of the stink bugs’ mouthparts, allowing them to hunt but not eat.

“We created a predator that couldn’t kill its prey,” Kaplan says. “It was a way to be able to expose the prey to a risk and still be able to study the physiological responses of the prey.”

The scientists also wondered whether the physiological responses were due to the presence of the predator or simply from a lack of food. To test, they removed food from some caterpillars that had eaten as much as a caterpillar facing a predator. Other caterpillars were given food off and on until they had eaten the same amount as one facing a predator to better mimic those same feeding patterns.

In both cases, the caterpillars weighed less and did not exhibit the same physiological changes as their hunted counterparts, Kaplan says.

“This is a predator response rather than a physiological response due to a lack of food.”

Jennifer S. Thaler, associate professor of entomology at Cornell University is lead author of the study, which was funded by the US Department of Agriculture.

More news from Purdue University: http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/