This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Jason Goldman.

Imagine you're an aphid, a tiny insect that sucks plant sap for a living. You're munching away when a cow comes along to munch on the same plant

urine. You feel its warm breath, so you drop to the ground to avoid being eaten and run away.

The ground is a scary place for an aphid, but it's better than a cow's mouth.

But if you're an especially small young aphid, also known as a nymph, scampering over cracks, stones, and twigs is really difficult.

Luckily, young aphid set the solution.

They climb aboard the back of a larger aphid that's also making an escape and hitch a ride, cowboy style.

Sometimes there's like a pile of nymphs at the beginning that climb on the adult.

Sometimes it's in eight or 9 nymphs that all climb on the adult.

University of Haifa entomologist, Mosha Gish.

Thanks to a series of experiments, Gish learned that the Nymphs actively seek out adults after dropping to the ground.

It's not that they just try to climb onto any old thing they find nearby. For the adults, the nymphs are a bit of a nuisance.

There is some disadvantage for the assault. It slows it down.

The grown-ups try to toss off their riders like a mechanical bull at a college bar, and they'll toss

off a relative just the same as they will an unrelated nymph. But somehow evolution has allowed this piggyback writing behavior to persist.

Probably the cost that the adult pays for that delay is not high enough to balance the benefit that the colony gets from saving a few mymph.

In other words, the advantage to the younger bugs outweighs the cost imposed on the older ones.

The entire colony benefits.

The results are in the journal Frontiers in Zoology. AFIS are some of agriculture's most important pests,

but to Gish they are also a part of a fascinating important ecosystem.

Most people, they think of Aids as, if we think of aphids, they think of aphids as tiny dots on their plants that kill off their

...