Brightly-Colored Bugs Sit on Medicinally-Active Plants

"If you're poisonous, it's to your advantage to advertise that to your predators," says Capson. But to him, the bright colours tell an entirely different tale. "What it's telling us is: 'You should go ahead and sample the plant I'm eating to search for pharmaceutical compounds'," he says.

Capson's team decided to test their theory in the forests of Panama. They chose 10 plants which they knew contained medicinal compounds, and 10 non-medicinal plants which looked very similar to them. In four national parks, they searched for the plants in their natural environment and recorded the number of bright insects on their leaves as they went.

Source: New Scientist