If you've ever kept a garden,
You're probably familiar with aphids
Sometimes called plant lice,
They're hoards of tiny soft-bodied insects swarming your rose bushes and killing your green beans
But, they also do some stranger things to help themselves survive
Things like pooping sugar and cloning themselves and giving birth to pregnant babies
The over 4,000 plus members of the aphiditae family infest plants all over the world and lots of people think of them as pests.
Because Aphids suck.
Literally.
They use their long slender mouth parts
Which work kind of like a straw surrounded by needles
To pierce tender plant stems and suck sap from the
That sap is a plant's energy source.
So, a large colony of aphids can damage or even kill a plant by sucking it dry
Not only that
So they end up with way more sugar than they actually need
So much more, in fact, that
Technically, it's called
And lots of insects go totally nuts for it.
Unsurprisingly
Some species of ants actually set up a kind of farm
Managing large colonies of aphids, to get their honeydew fix
It's a sweet deal for both species because the aphids get ant bodyguards
To protect them from predators
Because if you taste like a jellybean, you're gonna attract some attention from things that wanna eat you
But, the aphids don't just rely on the ants to protect them
They have a few defensive tricks of their own
Instead of waiting to mate with a male in the spring and summer months,
A mama aphid can cook up a whole bunch of clone daughters inside of her
Now, parthenogenesis is pretty common among insects but lady aphids have another reproductive shortcut:
Sometimes up to a dozen nymphs a day
This way the aphids don't have to wait for the eggs to develop and hatch
And the next generation is quickly up and running
And in some species, all of those daughter nymphs are actually already carrying more daughter embryos
In other words,
An aphid mom could be carrying her daughters and granddaughters at the same time
Sometimes though, the aphids environment changes, and good food becomes scarce
In that case,
And therefore have a better chance of finding a new place to live
Most aphids are wingless, which makes sense,
It takes a lot of energy to build a decent pair of wings
And, since most aphids spend their whole lives just on a single plant,
They get around just fine by walking
But,
Winged aphids aren't great flyers, but they usually don't need to travel very far
And, once they find a new host plant,
They'll start a whole new colony
As lush plants start to naturally wither in autumn,
In some species, these sexually viable males and females don't even have mouth parts for eating
Their only job is to make babies
The aphids mate, and lay hardy, fertilized eggs that can survive through the winter on host plants
The following spring, those eggs hatch to produce wingless females, and the whole
So, it's no wonder that aphid infestations are so common, they got some crazy survival skills
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...And they wriggle around inside of you like a worm,
While the bug probes around for blood vessels
Once it finds one, blood gets sucked up through the...