In the insect world, impostors could be hiding anywhere.
When lifting a stone during an expedition in the Anti-Atlas Mountains in Morocco, researchers came across an unusual sight: three blowfly larvae living inside a termite nest.
“I immediately thought ‘Wow, this is something cool,’ because I’ve never seen anything like that,” says entomologist Roger Vila of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona.
Vila and colleagues brought the larvae and some termites to the lab, hoping to understand how the interlopers manage to get by unnoticed among harvester termites (Anacanthotermes ochraceus), which are known to kill intruders that enter their nests. The team examined the insects under the microscope,