In a lab face-off, 43 percent of Pheropsophus jessoensis bombardiers escaped alive after being swallowed by toads, a pair of researchers at Kobe University in Japan report February 7 in Biology Letters. These lucky beetles were ******* up — in one case, 107 minutes after being gulped — covered with goo, but still able to pull themselves together and walk away. Fifteen of the 16 beetles coughed up into daylight lived for at least 17 days, with one still going 562 days later.
Scalding internal beetle blasts proved vital in persuading the toads to spit the bugs up, ecologists Shinji Sugiura and Takuya Sato report. The pair prodded beetles into spraying until no more defensive chemicals remained, and then fed defenseless beetles to toads. The toads kept almost all of these beetles down.
The bombardier group of more than 600 beetle species has become a textbook example of chemical defense (SN Online: 4/30/15). When provoked, the beetles mix two substances inside their abdomens that react explosively, then shoot this ******** out of their bodies in a noxious stream that can reach around 100° Celsius. Yet the defenses of very few of the species have been tested, Sugiura says.
