These baby beetles work together to look and smell like flowers
Parasitic beetles are the first animals known to imitate floral scents
By Chris Sims edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier
Blister beetle larvae have a bushy flower-like appearance.
Danny Kessler
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The European beetle lays thousands of eggs in spring. When they hatch, the bright orange larvae cling to flower stems and sit in clumps, waiting for passing solitary bees to latch onto them with hook-like appendages so they can lift them up. Researchers have discovered that these clumps give off a distinctly floral scent, making the larvae the first known animal to mimic the scent of a flower.
Ryan Alam, a chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany, and colleagues discovered that the larvae attract bees by emitting a collection of 17 scent compounds often found in flowers, including linalool oxide and lilac aldehyde. Once a larva has been airlifted to a bee’s nest, it feeds on the bee’s eggs and reserves of pollen and nectar. It stays there until it pupates, then leaves as an adult to start the cycle again.
In addition to attracting bees, the scent of the larvae also attracts other larvae, which could help them form these floral aggregations. The study was published on the bioRxiv preprint server and has not been peer-reviewed, but it “presents a compelling case that beetle larvae mimic flowers chemically, and perhaps visually, in order to deceive and attract bees,” says Jim McLean, an evolutionary biologist at Macquarie University in Australia, who was not involved in the study.
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Animals such as the orchid mantis imitate the appearance of flowers and corpse flower smells like rotten meat to attract insects, but these beetles add a new strategy to the mimicry playbook, Alam says.
Dmitry Telnov, an entomologist at the Natural History Museum in London, who was also not involved in the study, notes that another species of beetle in the United States may mimic the sex pheromones of host bees. Mimicking odors “could be an evolutionary approach used by beetles to attract specific species,” he says, “which is absolutely surprising.”
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