Eating your own kind is fairly common throughout the animal world, from single-celled amoebas to salamanders. But not as many species snack on their brethren as one might expect—and new research has detailed the reasons why. ⬇️
Jay Rosenheim had no idea his team’s plan to protect California’s cotton fields would lead to an explosion of cannibalism. Faced with ever-destructive cotton aphids—a tiny ravenous green insect that sucks sap from crops, leaving behind moldy waste and a slew of deadly viruses—he and his colleagues decided to sick another group of insects on them: a stout group of native aphid assassins known as big-eyed bugs.
First off, cannibalism is risky. If you’ve got dangerous claws and teeth, so do your comrades. Female praying mantises are notorious for biting the heads off of much smaller males during mating, for example, but they also occasionally go toe to toe with an evenly matched female. “I’ve seen one female chew the leg off another,” Rosenheim says, “and then the female who lost the leg somehow manages to kill the other one.
Although cannibalism is far from ideal, certain conditions appear to make the risky behavior worthwhile. Even if you’re eating a friend—or an heir—if you’re starving, you’ve got to protect your survival, says Erica Wildy, an ecologist at California State University, East Bay, who was not involved with the study. In her own work, Wildy has found that hunger makes long-toed salamander larvae more likely to nibble on—and occasionally eat—one another.
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