Insects, masters of disguise for more than 100 years

According to scientists, insects carried debris to hide predators and sneak up on prey for more than 100 million years ago.

Dressing to camouflage is best way to hide. Just blend in the environment and you'll be just fine. For humans, wear a common shirt, pants, glasses or hat and you'll be in your disguise easily. But insects their own way of doing it.

Little bugs cover themselves with bits of plants, dirt, and even exoskeletons of other insects to hide from their predators and sneak up on their prey. Scientists just discovered that they have been mastering this disguise for more than 100 million years already.

Some insects walk or fell into sticky tree resin wearing their self-selected suit and as time passed, that sticky goop hardened forming a fossilized amber, freezing the insect in time.

Sounds familiar?

Jurassic Park

Anyway, because of these amber fossils, scientists managed to discover little bits of plants, exoskeletons' dirt, and other particles that other preservation process do not. Bo Wang and his colleagues provided the palaeobiologists a detailed snapshots of the camouflaging insects in action million years later.

Wang and his colleagues hunted through more than 300,000 amber specimens from Myanmar, China, France, and Lebanon in search of insects displaying debris-carrying behavior. They described 39 specimens in a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances.

These fossils show this behavior in three distinct groups of insects: Chrysopidae (green lacewings), Myrneleontoid (split-footed lacewings and owlies), and Reduviidae (assassin bugs).

Besides one 110-million-year old green lacewing found encased in Spanish amber, the specimen Wang and his team examined are the oldest direct examples of insects displaying such behavior.

These insects carry quite a large load of trash on their backs. And they have an interesting structure to support their camouflage coat.

Some of the insects have long filaments or shorter sticking up off their backs that seems to anchor the debris cloak. This feature still appears in the living relatives of those prehistoric specimens.

However, only one group (chrysopoid larvae) exhibits highly setigerous tubular tubercules on the thorax and abdomen, which are no longer seen in extant chrysopoid larvae.

According to Wang, their need to camouflage must have had strong evolutionary drivers because these features "evolved separately in three groups of Cretaceous insects, some of which are later distributed in the world."

Furthermore, all the specimens described in the new paper are juveniles, larvae. So they must have been learning to create a trash cloak in an early age.

Source: The Christian Science Monitor

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