The female flicks her eggs to the forest floor, where they resemble hard seeds. Each egg carries a capitulum, a fatty knob comparable to the elaiosome of ant-dispersed plant seeds. Ants pick up the eggs and carry them into the nest, eat the capitulum, and leave the rest in the refuse chamber, where the egg sits protected from fire, drought and egg predators.
When it hatches, the nymph is inside an ant colony. It emerges black with a reddish head, holds its body in an ant-like posture, and runs in short rapid bursts rather than the slow swaying walk of a later instar. It leaves the nest and climbs into vegetation, where after the first moult it turns brown or green and adopts the twig-and-leaf appearance of the adult.
The ant resemblance is well described morphologically and behaviourally. What has not been demonstrated is exactly which observers it deceives: whether the mimicry primarily protects the nymph from the ants themselves during its exit, or from visually hunting predators encountered on the journey to a food plant, remains untested.