Butterfly larvae make noises for some reason

What do tress butterfly pupae have to talk about ?

The relaxing chirp of crickets and katydids are familiar summer sounds, but what is that hushed “twittering” coming from the nursery at the butterfly house? It turns out that the pupae of certain butterflies also make noise, and new research shows that some produce their sounds with a never-before-known mechanism.

In a study published in August in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America, a research team found that the pupae of dozens of brush-footed and swallowtail butterflies—in the families Nymphalidae and Papilionidae, respectively—do some modified twerking, an abdominal wiggling movement that triggers sound from tiny structures located at the membranes between their abdominal segments. Children and young adults have sufficiently sensitive hearing to pick up the twittering at close range, and mobile phones can record it. But, to analyze the soft sound, the researchers had to employ sophisticated ultrasound equipment.

Asked the purpose of pupal sounds, Boppré says, “We can only speculate. With many organisms, sound production is a defensive mechanism alerting some potential predator, but at this point we don’t have a proper natural history basis that we can use for an explicit interpretation.”

https://entomologytoday.org/2018/09/06/butterfly-sounds-pupae-make-sounds-never-before-known-ways/