![]() Most birds fly, but throughout history there have been the occasional species that don’t.Ĭhemical: A substance formed from two or more atoms that unite (bond) in a fixed proportion and structure. Birds are jacketed in feathers and produce young from the eggs they deposit in some sort of nest. ![]() The scientists who study them are known as biologists.īirds: Warm-blooded animals with wings that first showed up during the time of the dinosaurs. Adults tend to have hard and/or horn-like “forewings” which covers the wings used for flight.īehavior: The way something, often a person or other organism, acts towards others, or conducts itself.īiology: The study of living things. These materials often are capable of eating away at some minerals such as carbonate, or preventing their formation in the first place.Īquatic: An adjective that refers to water.Īverage: (in science) A term for the arithmetic mean, which is the sum of a group of numbers that is then divided by the size of the group.īeetle: An order of insects known as Coleoptera, containing at least 350,000 different species. “I’m looking forward to finding unimaginable types of antipredator defense,” he says.Īcidic: An adjective for materials that contain acid. Sugiura plans to test the limits of the beetle’s abilities by pairing the insect with larger frogs, toads and even fish. The beetle can also breathe underwater via air pockets tucked under its hardened wings. This may shield the insect from digestive juices. It has a streamlined, but sturdy, exoskeleton. The beetle’s aquatic lifestyle likely prepared it to survive digestion, Sugiura now says. Their carcasses took a day or longer to pass through the frogs. None of these immobilized beetles survived. To confirm that the beetles were actively escaping from the frog’s digestive tract, Sugiura fixed some beetles’ legs in place with sticky wax. One intrepid beetle, though, made the journey in just six minutes! ![]() Most beetles complete the trip within 6 hours. Those creatures typically survive fewer than two times in 10. They greatly outshined other animals known to survive digestion-by-predator. He found that more than nine in every 10 beetles survived being eaten. Sugiura watched more than 30 more beetle-frog match ups. “I was expecting that the frogs might just spit out the beetles or something.” It’s the first documented example of prey actively escaping a predator through the digestive system. After traveling the frog’s digestive tract, the beetle emerges from the back end of the amphibian, alive. Then the insect scurried away, seemingly unharmed.Ībout two hours before this video begins, this pond frog ( Pelophylax nigromaculatus) ate a water beetle ( Regimbartia attenuata). But as Sugiura watched, he saw the shiny black beetle slip out from the frog’s butt. A trip through the frog’s acidic, oxygen-poor digestive system, though, should be enough to kill the insect. The frogs lack teeth, so the beetle didn’t get crunched. The frog quickly downed the unsuspecting beetle. ![]() In his lab, he paired one of these beetles with a frog that the insect often sees while swimming through Japanese rice paddies. attenuata might have evolved its own evasive tactics. The beetles start the process by releasing a mix of hot, noxious chemicals from their rear ends. In 2018, he discovered bombardier beetles can force toads to vomit them back up. He is an ecologist at Kobe University in Japan. ![]() Shinji Sugiura regularly feeds beetles to predators to see what happens. It was published August 3 in Current Biology. But this new research is the first to document prey actively escaping out the backside of a predator. They just seal their shells and wait it out. Some snails survive the trip through fish and birds. It’s not unheard of, but surviving digestion-by-predator is rare. “There are still a lot of truly bizarre habits of insects that still wait to be discovered,” she says. She works at its Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Mass. She’s an entomologist, or insect biologist, at Harvard University. “This is legitimately the first article in a while that made me say, ‘Huh! How weird!’” says Crystal Maier. Afterward, it climbs out the frog’s butt, alive and well. Instead, the Regimbartia attenuata will travel down the frog’s throat, swim through the stomach and slide along the intestines. It doesn’t succumb to the frog’s digestive juices. For most insects, the sticky, slingshot ride straight into a frog’s mouth spells the end. ![]()
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