It’s easy to imagine an adult bird standing over youngsters with mouths open wide for a pre-mashed meal. It’s more difficult to picture a beetle doing this, but the burying beetle Nicrophorus quadripunctatus feeds its young by the same mouth-to-mouth regurgitation technique. Researchers found that burying beetle larvae can sense when the mother beetles emit a pheromone, 2-phenoxyethanol, when they are ready to feed their young.
