This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Bob Hirschon.

If you're a skunk or fox or a very strange person and you poke your nose under a rock in the desert southwest looking

for something to eat, you might be surprised to see dozens of bright blue and red

beetles scurrying to and fro. And you might be really curious as they quickly turn their butts towards you.

But the curiosity wouldn't last long. A couple of thousands of a second later, a few solot of

boiling hot toxic spray would drive off both you and your musings. The insects with a spraying

butts are fittingly named Bombardir beetles and they can fire off 500 pulses per second of

caustic defensive chemicals. What also makes them unusual is that even though

the nocturnal beetles are solitary by night, dozens or even hundreds of them of various

bombardier species snuggle together under rocks during the day.

It's actually a fairly unusual phenomenon for different species to regularly associate with one another.

University of Arizona entomologist Wendy Moore.

But these guys are sheltering together and they're actually doing it intentionally,

you know, because they have more options.

There's plenty of options within the habitat that they could actually

segregate out by species and they don't.

In fact, when Moore and her colleagues put Beatles into a setting where they had cozy solitary

hiding places, as well as hiding places already packed with other Beatles, the newcomers

invariably chose to shelter with others under the crowded rocks. The study is in the

Journal, Ploss 1. Moore says budding up may help protect the insects from

predators. Bambadir beetles produce benzocanones which are really

powerful as a matter of defense but these

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