Nature · 2
What effect does a stick insect's foul-smelling chemical secretion have on predators after it plays dead?
Answer
It causes them to reject the insect as spoiled or rotten food
The chemical odor mimics the smell of decay, which convinces predators the stick insect is inedible, causing them to abandon it rather than continue attacking.
💡 Did you know?
Stick insects can play dead while oozing a foul-smelling chemical from their legs—predators often reject them as rotten food.
Other options people guess
- It paralyzes the predator instantly
- It attracts other predators to the scene
- It causes the predator to lose its sense of smell
Topics
- camouflage
- insects
- defense-mechanisms
- chemical-defense
Know your nature trivia?
Play a free Nature quiz and see how many you get right — no signup needed to start.
More Nature facts
Nature
Caterpillars of which butterfly genus can inflate their thorax to mimic a snake's head, complete with false eyes and fangs, when threatened?
Caterpillars of the Papilio butterfly can mimic snake heads—complete with false eyes and fangs—by inflating their thorax when threatened.
Nature
Cuttlefish achieve precise color-matching camouflage despite lacking which specific visual ability?
Cuttlefish can change skin color and texture in 200 milliseconds despite having no color vision, guided entirely by pattern-recognition neurons in their skin.
Nature
Which animal produces silk strong enough that NASA has researched it as a potential material for lightweight body armour?
Golden silk orb-weaver spider silk has been woven into an actual golden-coloured textile — a full cape displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum took over a million spiders to produce.
Nature
Which of an octopus's three hearts stops beating while it swims, explaining why it prefers crawling instead?
Octopuses have three hearts: two pump blood to the gills, while the third stops beating when they swim, explaining why they prefer crawling.
Nature
After coral polyps expel their symbiotic algae during a heatwave, why do they typically begin to starve?
Coral polyps expel their algae partners during heat stress, then starve without them—bleaching is essentially a symbiotic breakup caused by warming oceans.
Nature
Which small songbird is famous for flying nonstop for about 86 hours over the open Atlantic Ocean during fall migration?
Blackpoll warblers fly nonstop for 86 hours across the Atlantic Ocean, burning half their body weight in fuel.