Author: Susan Milius / Source: Science News
However badly that home renovation goes, be glad you’re not a young aphid.
Colonies of tiny Nipponaphis monzeni aphids in eastern Asia use their own young as part repair crew, part repair goo.
The tiny fluffs of juvenile insects end up dying after gushing white glop from their bodies to repair a hole in the wall protecting their colony in Asian winter hazel trees. New details of this patching chemistry suggest that these doomed young aphids are a colony’s version of immune system cells, researchers report April 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The need for repair can arise while hundreds or thousands of these aphids live inside a hard-shelled, closed lump called a gall, which forms on the trees and balloons around the insects over several years. When a caterpillar manages to chew through the wall, white wingless aphid youngsters called soldiers, swollen almost to bursting with fluids, rush to the breach.
Some soldiers mob and sting the intruder. Others get on with patching the hole. They “erupt,” says evolutionary biologist and entomologist Takema Fukatsu of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan. From paired openings, or cornicles, near the rear, each soldier pops out huge (in aphid terms) white gobs of fatty substances and other compounds…
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