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Warrior aphids! What a bizarre notion. The thought of rampaging greenfly is something out of science fiction – anyway they just aren’t built in the martial fashion. So I thought, until I read an article in the recent Bulletin of the Royal Entomological Society. Their discovery twenty years ago was greeted with surprise and some scepticism. It must be said that this is not a common behaviour pattern and out of 4000 aphid species only 50, limited to two families, produce soldiers.

Their single shared attribute is that they form galls – soldiers only occur in gall-forming species, and one must ask how this behaviour could have come about. For a start, galls contain cloned descendants of a single female foundress so the gall represents a defensible resource where genetic integrity is high.

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