Interactions in Native Habitat
In South America, Cactoblastis cactorum has many natural predators, including ants and New World monkeys. Ants, the moth's main predators, consume its larvae. New World monkeys hollow out the larvae and pupae from the flattened leaf-like stems, or "cladodes", of the cacti. The relationship between Cactoblastis cactorum and Opuntia cactus species is parasitic: the moth feeds on the host cactus. In South America, it feeds on all Opuntia cactus species, with few exceptions (Opuntia sulphurea, Opuntia pampeana, Opuntia quimilo and others). Unlike other Cactoblastis species, Cactoblastis cactorum is not host-specific. Outside of these interactions, much of the moth’s relationship within its South American habitat is unexplored.
Read more about this topic: Cactoblastis Cactorum
Famous quotes containing the words interactions, native and/or habitat:
“In child rearing it would unquestionably be easier if a child were to do something because we say so. The authoritarian method does expedite things, but it does not produce independent functioning. If a child has not mastered the underlying principles of human interactions and merely conforms out of coercion or conditioning, he has no tools to use, no resources to apply in the next situation that confronts him.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.”
—William James (1842–1910)