A research team led by Associate Professor Kei Ito of the Department of Life and Environmental Medicine has announced the results of a collaborative study on stick insects.
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Until now, it was commonly believed that insects eaten by birds lost their chance of survival, along with their offspring.In contrast, Associate Professor Kei Ito and former graduate student Shoichi Funaki of the Department of Life and Environmental Medicine at Kochi University, in collaboration with Specially Appointed Lecturer Kenji Suetsugu of the Graduate School of Science at Kobe University and Associate Professor Gaku Yokoyama of the Department of Biological Production Sciences at the Graduate School of Agricultural Science at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, formulated and tested the hypothesis that “when insects are eaten by birds, the eggs inside their bodies may sometimes be excreted undigested.”They successfully demonstrated that when stick insect eggs—known for their hard shells—were fed to birds, some of the eggs were excreted intact and hatched.
This study, which shows that insects can still produce offspring even after being eaten by birds, overturns the common belief that insect predation by birds invariably leads to death. Rather, for insects with limited mobility, such as stick insects, predation by birds can actually serve as a factor promoting the expansion of their distribution.
These results were reported in newspapers and other mainstream media and became a hot topic on social media.
Feature Article
The paper will be published online in the international journal *Ecology* on May 29.