In South Africa, special “mirid bugs” make their homes in sticky, living-flypaper plants, feeding on other insects that get trapped in the plants’ leaf-secreted glue. How do they avoid getting stuck themselves?

German researchers at the Max Planck Institute conducted a study to find out, and the results from their investigations recently appeared in The Journal of Experimental Biology.¹ All insects have a thin outer film coating, but the scientists found that the mirid bugs have a coat of non-stick grease that counteracts the plant glue and is 30 times thicker than that of a blowfly.² Upon microscopic inspection, tiny droplets of the plant glue easily ran off of the mirid bug, but adhered to the blowfly.

Mirid bugs are integral to the cross-pollination of their flypaper plants. These woody plants, named Roridula gorgoneus, have specially-designed flowers that the mirid bug’s needle-shaped mouthpart activates. “One species [of mirid bug] for each Roridula species, pierce and feed from the anther.…The piercing causes the anthers to spring up through 180°, dusting the insects with pollen.”³

How does such a symbiotic system develop wherein a plant relies on one species of insect for cross-pollination, and that insect in turn depends on the plant to provide food? Further, how did the plant glue and the correct quality and quantity of the insect’s “anti-glue” arise, both of which were necessary preconditions for their interdependent living relationship? Such a specific balance demonstrates a fully-formed design, rather than an imaginary proto-status or transitional state.

Similar precisely-calibrated features characterize other plant and animal relationships. Apparently, when God created these living things to reproduce “after their own kinds,”⁴ he also created them to reproduce in concerted harmony with specific but unrelated other kinds.

References

1. Voigt, D. and S. Gorb. 2008. An insect trap as habitat: cohesion-failure mechanism prevents adhesion of Pameridea roridulae bugs to the sticky surface of the plant Roridula gorgonias. The Journal of Experimental Biology. 211 (16): 2647-2657.
2. Phillips, K. 2008. How Nonstick Bugs Avoid Natural Flypaper. The Journal of Experimental Biology. 211 (16): i. Posted on jeb.biologists.org August 8, 2008, accessed August 14, 2008.
3. Kubitzki, K. 2004. The Families and Genera of Vascular Plants, Vol. 6. New York: Springer-Verlag, 340.
4. Genesis 1:11-12, 21-25.

* Mr. Thomas is Science Writer.

Article posted on August 21, 2008.