Articles

Wonderful Butterflies and Ants

By Anonymous

Ants and large blue butterfly caterpillars can live together in ants’ nests.

This is an example of symbiosis—the remarkable phenomenon by which two different organisms live together, usually for their mutual benefit. The larva wanders down from the thyme plant upon which it has been fed for three weeks, then waits for a red ant to find and stroke it. This stimulates the larva to produce a few drops of sweet honey-dew, which it takes back to the nest for feeding the ant larvae. The ant returns to find the front segments of the large blue larva puffed up—it grips it in its jaws and carries it off to the nest. Here the worker ants continue to obtain honey-dew from the larva which proceeds to eat the larvae of the host!

After a long winter hibernation and spring pupation, the adult blue butterfly crawls out of the ant nest and inflates its wings ready for flight and mating. Robert Gooden of Sherborne in England has pioneered a method of artificially rearing large blues and their ants in walnut shells, indoors. Each walnut houses one small ant nest and one blue larva. The adults which finally emerge are then taken to secret locations to re-populate the habitats where they may have become almost extinct. (An interesting aspect of this experiment is the use of another food plant, marjoram, which seems to suit the large blue butterfly equally well.)

The very existence of the large blue butterfly is dependent on ants. Destroying ant hills eliminates the large blue butterflies, which then cannot complete their life-cycle without the ants. Could such amazing symbiotic relationships between different kinds of creatures evolve by chance? How would one tell the other how to work the relationship perfectly? And how would both of them pass on this information to every one of their descendants?

The answer is that neither the process not the creatures evolved. Butterflies and ants, like God’s other creatures, were created in the beginning by the all-wise, all-knowing Creator God of the Scriptures.

CREATION EX NIHILO, vol. 10, no. 2 1988 pg. 9