Talk:Maculinea alcon

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General informaion on the myrmecophilous relationship between the Lycaenidae family and Ants has been moved to Lycaenidae. Alois visagie 20:52, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7171196.stm If someone gets bored you can pretty much rewrite the entire article based on the referenced research by these Dutch scientists. The 'relationship' referenced in this wiki article is that the butterflies have a chemical scent that 'tricks' ants into thinking they are larvae. This scent is only active in the butterflies' larval form. They start off on a meal plant, eat it a while, then drop off and start smelling like ants. The ants come along and pick them up, thinking they are ant larvae, and bring them to their nest. The butterfly larvae are so effective at mimicking ant larvae that ants will actually feed them preferentially to their own larvae. The Alcon larvae also eat ant larvae, making them a much greater threat than a simple freeloader. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.173.200.116 (talk) 19:40, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

The current version said in the second paragraph

All large blue butterflies are rare because of this interaction with ants[clarify].

without having talked about ants before; this is clearly confusing. I removed the statement since

  • it isn't referenced;
  • I severely doubt that this applies to "all large blue" butterflies; for one thing, not all large blue butterflies interact with ants.

AxelBoldt (talk) 01:06, 7 January 2008 (UTC)