Philip James de Vries - Singing Caterpillars

Singing Caterpillars

DeVries discovered the substrate-borne calls produced by caterpillars that form symbioses with ants in the butterfly families Riodinidae and Lycaenidae. In these symbioses, ants provide protection against arthropod predators in exchange for food secretions. DeVries demonstrated experimentally that the calls produced by singing caterpillars function to enhance caterpillar-ant symbioses in concert with caterpillar glands that produce food and chemical secretions. He also has shown that singing caterpillars occur widely throughout the world. His studies were the first to show that acoustical calls of one insect species can evolve to attract unrelated species in the context of symbiotic associations, fitting into a field of biological science termed Bioacoustics. Documentation and examination of interactions between organisms of different species integrate the fields of Natural History, Ecology and Evolution.