What is Ehrlichiosis?

It is a large fluffy larva of the tiger moth. In autumn, people often see many such caterpillars crawling across the road.

Tiger Moth Caterpillar

The caterpillar of the tiger moth caterpillar on Ellesmere Island, Canada is one of the most extreme hardy animals on the planet. It can hibernate at temperatures as low as minus 70 degrees Celsius, even if its blood and any other extracellular fluids are frozen. , It can still survive.

Evolutionary ecologist Michael Singer of Wesleyan University in Middleton, Connecticut, and his colleagues made this discovery because they noticed that tiger moth caterpillars are very fond of Plagiobothrys arizonicus and other bands. Poisonous foods containing pyrrolizidine alkaloids. Tiger moth caterpillars are often parasitized by larvae of parasitic flies. Because the toxins can increase the survival rate of tiger moth caterpillars, although they also inhibit their growth, researchers wonder whether alkaloids work as a drug.

In the laboratory, the researchers provided pyrrolizidine alkaloids or sugars to parasitic fly larvae as well as tiger caterpillars that were not parasitic. Researchers have found that tiger moth caterpillars carrying parasitic fly larvae eat twice as many alkaloids as their non-parasitic counterparts, and these alkaloids have increased the survival rate of tiger moth caterpillars by 20%. . Researchers have published the results of this research in the recent Science Public Library-Comprehensive ( PLoS ONE ). According to Singer, this means that when tiger moth caterpillars living in the wild feed on popcorn and other poisonous plants, they are actually healing themselves.