Birds construct careful nests and spiders make intricately woven webs, but a new species of beetle shelters itself from the elements a little differently.
"Builders tend to minimize the cost of building while maximizing the benefits," a Pensoft Publishers press release reported.
Leaf beetles are rarely builders, but certain tiny adolescents sometimes use their own feces as a "defensive shield. Two recently discovered related species of Indian leaf beetles found their own way to "modify low cost shelters."
These beetles, called Orthaltica eugenia and Orthaltica terminalia, are about the size of a pin head, so they are able to squeeze into leaf holes made by larger munching beetles.
"Leaf-hole shelters provide a roosting site that offers a certain degree of camouflage as well as protection. In the field it was observed that on sensing the presence of an enemy on one side of the leaf the occupant of a leaf-hole shelter could easily shift to the other side, making itself invisible to the intruder. It may also be presumed that larger predators cannot pass through the hole in pursuit of the occupant," the study reported.
