信息来源于LiveScience。
Strange "snake insects"
The mystery of the "snake bug" began 16 years ago, in the summer of 2007, when Maggie Billington, a resident of Alaska, USA, saw a small snake in the distance on her way home. As a volunteer at the University of Alaska's Northern Museum in Fairbanks, she has some knowledge of biology and is also interested in a variety of animals.
After keeping a safe distance, Billington began to carefully observe this strange little snake, which was somewhat flat, and when she saw the appearance of this "snake" clearly, she couldn't help but get goosebumps: where is this snake? It is clearly a snake shape composed of thousands of tiny larvae like worms, and they can actually crawl in unison, and from a distance it looks like a slow little snake!
This bizarre sight was documented, and photographs and samples were brought to the museum's insect curator, Derek Sykes. Sykes thinks it must be a larva of some kind of fly family, but it is impossible to determine what kind of fly it is, and the larvae are particularly difficult to identify. But he had never seen such a behavior before! So he and his colleagues started researching.
New species
On December 30, 2023, Sykes's team published the results of the study in the journal Integrative Systematics: Stuttgart's Contribution to Natural History, but the focus is on identifying the flies as a new species, and the reasons for their behavior as "snakes" remain to be studied.
This new species of fly is named Sciara serpens, and they feed on decaying organic matter. Because the larvae of flies are difficult to distinguish between in the juvenile stage, the team waited until the larvae collected during the "snake bug" sightings metamorphosed into adults before the research began to progress.
The fly bears a special resemblance to a European fly called Sciara mirabilis, which the team initially misidentified. It wasn't until 2021 that one of the team members, Thalles Pereira, an insect researcher from the University of Alaska's Northern Museum, examined the genitals of male Sciara serpens under a high-powered microscope and found significant differences in shape compared to their European relatives. Only then did the team confirm that Sciara serpens is a new species in science.
Sciara serpens have more in common with Sciara mirabili than they do with their North American counterparts, which seems a bit strange because it doesn't seem reasonable to say that they don't resemble their relatives around them, but rather their relatives from far away in Europe? 700 years ago) spread from eastern Siberia to Alaska via the Bering land bridge, bringing different genes to new areas, and then the huge ice caps blocked the rest of North America, making it impossible for these insects to return to North America, and they had to evolve on their own with an attachment to their homeland.
"Snake Bug"
As for this phenomenon of "snakes", because there are very few observational records so far, researchers can only speculate. They believe that the larvae are grouped together to take on the shape of snakes to scare away birds and other potential predators, or to retain moisture on dry ground by crawling with each other in a line.
Oh yes, there's something particularly strange. It was in these sightings that beetles were seen following the "snake bugs", which led them to speculate that the beetles fed on the larvae of the Sciara serpens. But when the researchers did put the beetles in the research room, the beetles rarely bothered with the larvae of the Sciara serpens.
So, despite identifying the species behind these strange phenomena, researchers still have a lot of work to do to fully understand these new species and their peculiar larval habits.