One insect crawled through the amphibian’s insides in just six minutes
For most insects, the sticky, slingshot ride straight into a frog’s mouth spells the end. But not for one stubborn water beetle.Instead of succumbing to the frog’s digestive juices, an eaten Regimbartia attenuata traverses the amphibian’s throat, swims through the stomach, slides along the intestines and climbs out the frog’s butt, alive and well.
“This is legitimately the first article in a while that made me say, ‘Huh! How weird!’” says Crystal Maier, an entomologist at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. “There are still a lot of truly bizarre habits of insects that still wait to be discovered,” she says.
Surviving digestion-by-predator is rare, but not unheard of in the animal kingdom.
