For Akito Kawahara and his colleagues, a few shots of mezcal were well deserved after a long day of catching butterflies in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula four years ago. But just because booze was on the table didn’t mean the work was over.
Kawahara remembers someone mentioning that a bottle of mezcal at the bar contained one of the infamous tequila worms. When the team asked the bartender for the worm for further inspection, “he thought we were crazy,” says Kawahara, a lepidopterist (a person that studies moths and butterflies) at the University of Florida.
And yet a quick internet search revealed that the tequila worm’s species wasn’t completely clear — despite its existence being fairly common knowledge among the drinking public. “There was this mystery among the scientific community about what it actually was,” Kawahara says.
While the worm didn’t appear to be a moth larva, it was probably the larva of something; maybe a beetle or fly, the team thought initially. Purely in the interest of science, the researchers brought home some bottles of mezcal from their expedition in the peninsula and sequenced the worms’ DNA.
