Animals have evolved a variety of strategies to thwart their predators and avoid becoming the food in their mouths, but the Asian bombshell beetle can still hatch an escape plan after being swallowed.
Once inside the predator's stomach, the beetle sprays a hot chemical spray that causes vomiting. To understand the effectiveness of this chemical spray, the scientists collected bomb-dropping beetles from forests in central Japan, brought them back to the lab, and fed them to two predators: the Japanese common toad and the Japanese river toad.
In each experiment, the toad would quickly grab the bomb-dropping beetle and send it into its mouth. But after a few minutes, they will make a sound similar to an explosion in their abdomen, and in some cases a beetle will escape. Nearly half (43%) of toads spit out bomb-throwing beetles they devour.
Researchers report in a recent article published in Biological Communications that the beetles would then walk away unscathed, while others would remain in the toad's gastric juices for more than an hour.
The chemical spray is critical to the bomb-throwing beetle's escape plan, the researchers said, because the "pre-treated" bomb-throwing beetles are nearly impossible to survive because they have already sprayed most of the chemical. Only 5% of them escape from the intestines of toads.
So, you don't need to be a chameleon or a very fast "ghost" to escape the predator's clutches, you just need to pack some thermal chemicals. (Feng Weiwei)