Chinese Scientists Discover a Prehistoric Insect from Cretaceous Amber That Shows the Earliest Mimicry Behavior.
Morphological simulation of the larva (A) and the adult (B) of the ant-mimicking organism in the study. (Image: Yang Dinghua).
In a report last week, a research team from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology announced that they had collected over a dozen specimens of ant-mimicking insects from various countries, including China, the United States, Germany, Slovakia, and Myanmar. Notably, they highlighted a Cretaceous amber specimen that contained fossils still in larval form.
This organism measures between 3 to 5 mm and has slender appendages that closely resemble the antennae and legs of a primitive ant family that went extinct in the middle of the Cretaceous period, scientifically known as Alienopteridae.
Comparison of the ant-mimicking insect fossil (left) with the Alienopteridae fossil. (Image: CAS)
“Interestingly, this organism changed its mimicry target as it grew. The adult develops wings and can no longer mimic wingless ants; instead, they start to mimic wasps,” said Wang Bo, the lead researcher.
Dating back approximately 100 million years, this is the earliest evidence of myrmecomorphy behavior in animals, occurring 50 million years earlier than previously thought by paleontologists.
Myrmecomorphy is the phenomenon where certain species mimic ants in morphology and behavior to deceive predators or prey. Arthropods are the most common ant mimics, with some cases of mimicry being so accurate that they have led scientists to misclassify them.
The details of the research have been published in the journal Earth-Science Reviews, with support from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
