Credit: T. EISNER

What do the Denver Broncos have in common with a tiny beetle larva? A clue can be found in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (95, 1108-1113; 1998), where Thomas Eisner and colleagues describe a cunning mechanism that is used by larvae of the phengodid beetle to evade the chemical defences of millipedes larger than themselves — and then kill them.

Millipedes deter predators by squirting a toxic fluid from defensive glands found along the length of their bodies, apart from the first five segments and the last. Nevertheless, they are routinely eaten by phengodid larvae. First the worm-like larva coils its body around the front of the millipede, embedding its mouth parts in the millipede's neck and somehow immobilizing it. Then the larva retires underground before reappearing to consume the soft inner tissues, leaving only the skeletal parts and glandular sacs uneaten.

How does the larva do this? By staging encounters between a phengodid larva (Phengodid laticollis) and the millipede (Floridobolus penneri), Eisner and colleagues have found the answer — in piercing the millipede with its sickle-shaped mandibles, the larva delivers a lethal injection of regurgitated gastric fluid. Moreover, the millipede fails to discharge its defensive glands during the attack, and the authors found that the discarded glands of dead millipedes contain similar levels of benzoquinone toxins to their live counterparts.

So back to American football. The answer, of course, is that the Broncos and the beetle have both found a way to defeat more powerful opposition, coming away with — respectively — the superbowl and supper.