Brilliant 10: Butterfly Pharmacist
Watching how insects use plants shows that self-medication isn't just for complex animals "I didn't start working with monarchs because I liked them," says evolutionary biologist Jaap de Roode of Emory University. "I came to them because they have a really cool parasite." That parasite, called Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, normally pokes holes in the butterflies' skin, causing them to leak bodily fluids. But de Roode noticed that monarchs that ate the tropical milkweed plant did not suffer from parasitic infections as much as monarchs eating swamp milkweed did. This led him to suggest to his colleagues that the monarchs were self-medicating. "One of my reviewers said, ‘That's completely ridiculous. There's absolutely no way they could ever do that,'" de Roode recalls. Up until then, self-medication was seen as a complex cultural trait. Only a few animals, such as chimps and elephants, had been observed using medicine. To test his hypothesis, first de Roode...