Hell Yeah: This Maggot Has A Face On Its Butt
The Mission Impossible franchise is famous for its mask reveals. A dubiously explained technology allows an innocuous silver briefcase to print out a gummy-like mask that, once plastered to a face, transforms Tom Cruise into the spitting image of Philip Seymour Hoffman or various others, enabling him to infiltrate various lairs and turrets. The masks in Mission Impossible make for a fun game as a viewer: Is the bad guy you’re watching really a bad guy, or is he actually Ethan Hunt?
If Mission Impossible ever took place in a colony of harvester termites in the mountains of Morocco, Ethan Hunt might be, for once, out of a job. A new paper in Current Biology describes how the larvae of a blow fly has evolved to live, apparently unnoticed, inside the nests of harvester termites. Its main strategy, it seems, is the “termite mask” that protrudes from its rump. This mask features two antennae, a pair of sensory palps, and two large red “eyes” that are actually breathing holes. (Yes, the termite breathes from its butt; so what!)
Like many memorable maggot-related discoveries, this one was unplanned. The authors of the new paper, researchers at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) at the Spanish Research Council, do not study termites or flies, but rather butterflies and ants. They had come to the Anti-Atlas mountain range in Morocco in search of butterflies, but a surge of rain had driven the butterflies to seek shelter. The researchers decided to search for ants. “When we lifted a stone we found a termite mound with three fly larvae that we had never seen before,” Roger Vila, an evolutionary biologist at IBE and an author on the paper, said in a statement.
Most blow fly larvae—less charitably called maggots—develop in such abodes as carcasses, feces, and the open wounds of animals. So it was certainly surprising to find the maggots somewhere as luxurious as a termite colony, which is not unlike a gated community for arthropods, guarded by aggressive soldier termites. Termite colonies offer food and shelter to members of the colony. To interlopers, however, they offer death by dismemberment.
But it was clear the maggots had evaded the soldiers’ notice, allowing them to reap the rewards of their hosts’ communal living. The researchers observed as the maggots seemed to be fed via trophallaxis, in which termites regurgitate food into the mouths of other termites. The maggots were all found inside the termite mound’s food chambers—a very cushy place to be.
The inside of a termite colony is dark, which means that termites sense and recognize other termites with their antennae. The maggots have tentacle-like protrusions around their body that seem to allow them to communicate with their fellow termites. Each termite colony has a signature scent, which is passed on to all its members and helps them detect intruders from other colonies, but the maggots mimicked this too. “They are indistinguishable from the termites in the colony where they live,” Vila said. “They smell exactly the same.”
When the researchers brought the maggots back to the lab, they discovered the larvae belong to a genus of flies called Rhyncomya, which was strange in that no other species in this genus are known to have evolved mimicry. Although the researchers attempted to raise the larvae on their own, the maggots died before they reached adulthood. The researchers speculated the larvae may have a symbiotic relationship with the termites and their nest. And the species appears rare. “We have made three more expeditions in that area and, despite lifting hundreds of stones, we found only two more flies, together, in another termite mound,” Vila said.
Who will these maggots grow into? For now, we can only speculate. “Their adult form remains a mystery,” Vila said. Will the maggots grow into flies that resemble termites in some other, new way? Will the maggots grow into blow flies unmistakable from any other blow fly? Will the maggots ride a motorcycle off a cliff? You never know what to expect from a master of disguise.
