How butterflies can eat cyanide
By Susan Milius
You’re a plant. How about deploying built-in cyanide bombs to defend against those that would eat you? It’s a nifty tactic that some plants actually use, but some caterpillars are so tough that they eat those cyanide bombs for breakfast.
For lunch and dinner, too. The caterpillars of the tropical butterfly Heliconius sara eat nothing but passion vines, which means they should be dead. That’s because the leaves of these vines have evolved powerful pesticides called cyanogens, chemicals that can releasehydrogen cyanide gas.