Trigona carbonaria is a bee without a stinger, one of the 10 or so out of 2,000 Australian bee species to lack the feature. This doesn’t appear to have been any concern… at least not until the hive beetle Aethina tumida showed up. This invasive insect may have reached the island continent along with a flock of athletes during the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, and as the name suggests, it like to invade beehives. But it hasn’t been very successful in this case, thanks to creative defensive tactics by the bees.

Since the worker can’t sting, they instead make the beetles into mummies. Workers swarm to the approaching beetle, which adopts the turtle defense–tucking in its head and legs, according to researcher Mark Greco, whose team used CT scans to see the action inside the hive. Then the construction onslaught starts. From BBC News:

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The animal kingdom is full of weird stuff, like animals that turn into zombies—and one thing many of them will do is go to great (and gross) lengths to avoid predators.

Armored crickets, which are native to Namibia, South Africa, and Botswana, have a particularly disgusting means of driving away predators: They spew vomit and spurt hemolymph (the mollusk and arthropod version of blood) from under their legs and through slits in their exoskeleton. Katydids do it too; in fact, in Germany the species has acquired the nickname “blutspritzer,” or “blood squirter.”

But that’s not all. Wounded crickets can attract other crickets foraging for protein and salt—and the healthy crickets are happy to become cannibals. According to BBC:

“When swarms [of crickets] in the African bush meet a road, lots get squashed and the others gather for a feast, so more get squashed until there can be a thick, acrid pancake of dead and moribund crickets on the roadside, bleeding and attracting more cannibals,” says [entomologist Bill] Bateman.

The Regal Horned Lizard, too, uses the blood-spewing tactic, shooting the substance from a pocket near its eyes…straight at its attacker’s eyes and mouth.

Check out this video of the lizard shooting blood. (Caution: It’s graphic, as videos of animals spurting blood are wont to be).

Related Content:
Gallery: Cannibalism: The Animal Kingdom’s Dirty Little Secret
Gallery: Zombie Animals and the Parasite That Control Them
Discoblog: Disgusting Things Are Just as Gross Whether They’re Real or Imagined

Image: iStockphoto