Wasp Larvae Feed on Zombie Roaches

TheUploader writes "The story leaves nothing to embellish: The wasp, Ampulex compressa, has evolved to inject a toxin into a specific part of a roach's brain, turning it into a zombie. The wasp then leads the zombie roach into the wasp's nest, lays eggs inside it, and waits for its young to hatch, who will then go on to do the same to more roaches."

Comments

Re:MMM!

[Nataku564]

I believe this had been discovered quite some time ago. I seem to remember watching an episode of Nature (or something similar) that featured this particular wasp. In addition to injecting the toxin, it also snips off the antennae (disorienting it), and uses the stubs to herd it into its tomb.

Re:The world is a scary place...

[AlterTick]

how on earth would a parasite evolve the right chemical signal to trigger its host to jump into water or perch at the top of a tree?

Randomly. That's kinda the idea behind evolution. The one's that didn't develop the right chemical trigger didn't get the distinct advantage of the climbing-slave-bug spore dispersal.

Re:not the roach or wasp as you know them

[nwbvt]

"Nothing new here, except that this particular species has found a way to use the roaches power to move the body to a premade burrow instead of digging the burrow on the spot."

Yeah, hence why the headline read "Wasp Larvae Feed on Zombie Roaches" instead of simply "Wasp Larvae Feed on Roaches". This particular mechanism is the interesting aspect of this article.

"Unless Slashdot has a very high percentage of entymologists, I don't think it is that newsworthy for slashdot readers."

We may not have a large percentage of entymologists here, but it does have a large percentage of science nerds who enjoy reading about novel discoveries in the world of science (of course until the site recovers from being /.ed, its hard to determine whether or not this is indeed a novel discovery or just a reprint of something that was discovered some time ago).