Cooperative Hithhiking

Baby bugs team up for sex scam

The moment they're born, beetles of one species join forces for a curious drill.

The larvae hatch out of their eggs and together, as a group, climb to the tip of the plant. There, they secrete a sex pheromone that attracts a male of a bee who tries to couplate with the ball of larvae. They jump on him. He flies away carrying the little buggers.

When he finds a female to mate with, the larvae jump ship and go away hithhiking on her. When she goes back to her nest they disembark, eat the nectar she collected and her eggs before their final metamorphosis.

Arthropods are known to hitch rides on other animals, including larger arthropods, but this is the first documented case of a group hithchiking together.

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I tried to quote from the website and got that weird stuff. I copied and pasted from the website to wordpad to blogger wywywig to wordpad to movabletype and it still retained thsoe strange characters. So, I ditched the quote and wrote the post myself instead. The front page should update soon as well.