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Passion flowers and heliconid butterflies
Plants have evolved several ways to protect themselves from herbivorous animals.
Some use thorns or poisonous chemicals, but the passion flower has an especially
clever trick to keep certain insects away. There are butterflies whose caterpillars
eat exclusively passion flower leaves, the Heliconids or longwings. They can be
easily recognized by their rounded wings and slender bodies.
After mating, the female longwing searches for a suitable place to lay her eggs.
In a dense rain forest with hundreds of plant species, she has to find a passion
flower liana. If she chooses another plant, the caterpillars will starve. Once she
finds the right liana, she attaches the eggs individually to young shoots. If a
leaf has already been claimed by another Heliconid, she keeps looking. Some species
of passion flowers have found a cunning defense: their leaves have developed tiny
spots or growths that look just like longwing butterfly eggs! Plants with these
dummy eggs suffer much less than others from hungry Heliconid caterpillars.
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Passion flowers and heliconid butterflies (MP3, 521 KB)
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