Who hasn't been awakened in the middle of the night, whether in the city or in the countryside, by the shrill cry of a cat defending its territory against a slightly too daring peer? The typical behavior of our favorite domestic feline, with raised fur and arched back, sometimes foreshadows a much more violent duel, which can even draw blood. In nature, these instincts of ownership are found in many species, expressed in various forms - so much so that this scene of territory defense is a classic in wildlife documentaries.
Far from the spectacular charge of an elephant, which is difficult to reproduce in a laboratory, a team of researchers from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada focused on a creature smaller than a grain of rice: a caterpillar less than 2 millimeters long that lives on the leaves of the warty birch tree. It, too, defends its territory - less than 1 cm2 on the tip of its leaf - with impressive energy.
The Falcaria bilineata is a moth with two black bands that lives in North America. The female lays her eggs in clusters on birch leaves, but the emerging caterpillars scatter as quickly as possible to avoid being more than one per leaf. More precisely, they settle on the tip of the warty birch leaf, whose surface they scratch to feed themselves.
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