The most "perverted" food hoarding: They turned cockroaches into living food reserves

We have all heard this fable: in the summer, ants are busy storing food while grasshoppers are singing and having fun; in the winter, the ants have the last laugh - storing food is a very useful habit that can save lives at critical moments.

However, storing food is bound to face a problem: food will spoil. In order to prevent food from spoiling, animals have evolved a variety of strategies.

Arctic fox's natural refrigerator

The Arctic fox is very lucky because it has a large refrigerator with unlimited capacity - even in summer, there is still a layer of frozen permafrost in the polar soil, covered with insulating soil, just like a popsicle wrapped in a quilt.

In summer, a large number of birds come to the Arctic to give birth to their offspring, and lemmings also reproduce explosively. The Arctic fox can easily get a large number of bird eggs and lemmings. Therefore, it buries most of the food in the soil and "freezes" it with the help of the permafrost as life-saving food in the winter. It also stores seabirds such as the little auk (Alle alle).

Arctic fox and prey | Wikimedia Commons

Arctic foxes have an amazing sense of hoarding. On Bylot Island in northern Canada, Arctic foxes steal up to 88% of goose eggs, about 80% of which are buried. In a summer, an Arctic fox can store thousands of eggs or hundreds of seabirds. Other canids, such as red foxes, also bury food, but without the convenience of natural refrigerators, hoarding would never reach this scale.

However, the "refrigerator" is not foolproof. In the fable "The Fox and the Crow", the fox flatters the crow and makes it sing, but the crow drops the meat in its mouth and the fox steals it. But in real life, the crow's big cousin, the raven, can steal the fox's things. They can steal the wild goose eggs stored by the Arctic fox, which is much more convenient than the fox going to the wild goose nest to steal them.

As winter arrives, Arctic foxes change into white coats | Nixette / Wikimedia Commons

Pika's dry goods

The tiny pikas are the only group of lagomorphs that store food, and 10 species are known to store hay: chewing plants, drying them, and piling them into haystacks as a winter reserve.

Different pikas have different ways of storing food. North American pikas (Ochotona princeps) put hay under protruding rocks, using the rocks as natural eaves. Pawlowski's pikas (O. pallasi) pile hay on their burrows, which can be very large, and use stones to press down the entrance of the burrow to prevent the hay from being blown away by the wind. When storing food, efficiency must also be considered. Gansu pikas (O. cansus) like to eat grass from the Poaceae family, but rarely use grass to dry hay because the grass stems are slender and it is too troublesome for a small pika to carry them.

The round-headed pika looks adorable as it holds a handful of grass in its mouth. | Frédéric Dulude-de Broin / Wikimedia Commons

In addition to extending the shelf life of plants, drying them can also reduce the toxins in the plants. North American pikas will dry alpine featherleaf flowers (Acomastylis rossii) into hay before eating them, allowing the phenolic substances in them to be degraded.

However, we still don't know how important the hay stored by pikas is to their winter survival, because previous studies by different people have estimated the hay reserves of pikas to be very different. If there is enough hay, pikas can eat it for a whole winter; if there is too little hay, they can only use it as an emergency measure when the weather is extremely bad.

The miserable life of a honeypot

When it comes to food storage, the honeypot ant is definitely the most popular one - eating is storage. There are at least six genera of ants called honeypot ants, and the more famous honeypot ant species include Myrmecocystus mexicanus in America and Camponotus inflatus in Australia.

In the nests of M. mexicanus, you will find some of the strangest ants. They hang from the ceiling of the cave, their stomachs filled with sugar water, swollen like a small grape, and the color is usually appetizing amber, but also transparent and brown. The main source of sugar water is nectar from yucca glauca and the sugary excrement (commonly known as honeydew) produced by a gall wasp Holcaspis perniciosus. Humans can also eat "honey pots". The "honey pots" of C. inflatus are eaten as candy by Australian Aboriginals.

M. mimicus worker ants storing sugar water | Derrick Coetzee / Wikimedia Commons

The "honey pot" is the largest worker ant in the ant nest. Its crop is extremely inflated. If the sugar water is drained, the "honey pot" will become like a deflated balloon. Yucca nectar and gall wasp honeydew can only be produced in summer, and the "honey pot" can save these precious resources for winter use. The ants can spit out the sugar water at any time and feed it to their companions. In arid areas, the "honey pot" can also be used to store water.

If a grasshopper saw this, it might say, "I might as well starve to death in the winter!"

This extremely perverted storage method can only be seen in eusocial insects (such as ants and bees). In their colonies, individual organisms are like cells, doing extremely altruistic things for the benefit of the community. The role of the "honeypot" is very similar to that of fat cells, storing a large amount of nutrients for use in times of famine, but many fat cells never get the chance to be used in their lifetime.

Cruel and clever mud wasps

If there is anyone who has a more perverted way of preserving food than the honeypot ant, it's the green long-backed mud wasp (Ampulex compressa, also known as the flat-headed mud wasp). The mother mud wasp will catch a cockroach as food for her children. It takes a total of 8 days for the mud wasp to lay eggs and pupate, so the cockroach meat must be kept fresh at all times.

The green long-backed mud wasp has a strange and cruel technique. It will sting the cockroach twice. The first sting is to the thoracic ganglion, paralyzing the cockroach's front legs. The second sting is to the brain, which has a very strange effect: the cockroach still has the ability to move, but it cannot take the initiative to move, and can only be manipulated by the mud wasp like a zombie. The mud wasp will lead the cockroach, lead it to the nest like a cow, and then lay eggs on it. In this way, the cockroach is always alive, and the larvae can eat fresh cockroach organs after hatching.

A mud wasp performing surgery on a cockroach, and its eggs laid inside the cockroach | Kenneth C. Catania / Brain Behavior and Evolution (2020)

The venom of the mud wasp not only makes the cockroach immobile, but also changes the cockroach's nerve regulation, thus affecting its water regulation and metabolism. The stung cockroach loses water more slowly, and its metabolism is also slower, so it is less likely to starve to death or die of thirst. Cockroaches that have their nerves cut or injected with anesthetics will not survive more than 6 days; but about 70% of cockroaches stung by mud wasps can live for 9 days, which of course extends the shelf life of "cockroach luncheon meat".

After the wasp larvae hatch, they will first eat the less important internal organs of the cockroach, ensuring that the cockroach will survive to the end. Even though cockroaches often destroy our food reserves, it is still a bit too terrible to let them become the food reserves themselves.

Emerging mud wasp and the remains of a guinea pig | Pjt56 / Wikimedia Common

Author: Little Wombat

Editor: pee pee shrimp

This article comes from the Species Calendar, welcome to forward

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