Richard Jones explains how reverse metamorphosis\u00a0works… <\/p>
The standard progression of insects from egg, through feeding growing larva, metamorphosing chrysalis, and finally to fully winged adult, is not quite universal.<\/p>\n
Batflies (genus Ascodipteron<\/em>; family Streblidae) have taken this further \u2013 or backwards, depending on your point of view. When a female batfly emerges from her pupa on the floor of a bat roo in a cave or hollow tree, she mates and flies up to locate a host.<\/p>\n She then sheds her wings, burrows under the bat\u2019s skin and starts to revert to a maggot-like form, losing much\u00a0of the obvious head-thorax-abdomen\u00a0segmentation seen in most adult insects.<\/p>\n She feeds on bat blood, nourishing a single larva inside her abdomen, in a body cavity analogous to a womb. When the larva is fully grown, it is released, drops to the roost floor and pupates. Unlike most other insect larvae it does not feed or grow independently.<\/p>\n This is an extreme retrogression, but several other blood-sucking flies also lose their wings when they start living in their host\u2019s fur, and queen ants<\/a><\/strong> famously shed their wings after a mating flight so they can found a new colony underground.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n