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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."
of God's Intelligent Design on Earth
I have fuel for my nightmares now for several more years, thanks!
12:50 - press return.
Man, I think I've been on a date with that WASP. I woke up the next morning with no money, a splitting headache and size seven poopshoot.
Electric Monkey Pants
Somewhere there's a Romero zombie rolling over in its grave. Then crawling out. And eating someone's brains.
so I'd like to say...
SUCK IT YOU FUCKING ROACHES!
I feel better now.
Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just lost the picture, but what we've seen speaks for itself. The Roaches have apparently been taken over -- 'conquered' if you will -- by a master race of giant space wasps. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the wasps will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground honey caves.
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.
http://loom.corante.com.nyud.net:8090/archives/200 6/02/02/the_wisdom_of_parasites.php
Well the site appears to have been well and truly Slashdotted already. However, zombifying a creature for your own benefit isn't anything new.
I seem to recall there exists a paracite who's lifecycle consists of:
Be born in sheep shit.
Get eaten by an ant.
Zombify ant to cause it to climb grass, where it will be eaten by a sheep.
Reproduce inside digestive system of sheep.
If anyone who actually payed attention in biology classes cares to elaborate, please do!
I spent a summer in Ecuador in a field study class. We learned about one fungus that makes its living this way: Spores enter the body of an insect where they mature into the adult fungus. This adult fungus affects the mind of the bug so that it climbs to the tippy-top of whatever tree it's on. Then, when it's at the top it just sits there while the fungus consumes its innards. Finally, when the fungus is done growing, the body of the bug breaks open, and millions of spores go floating about on the wind.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
*Puts on karma-protection suit and helmet*
:P
*Turns on microphone - tweeeeeeet -*
*ahem ahem*
Ready?
Braaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiinnnsssssssss....
*Ducks*
We already have White Anglo-Saxon Protestant zombie-herding overloads...
"To face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable."
Now, I need to steal some genes from this little wasp, inject them into prostitutes. Then, take over the minds of a few select politicians. Next thing you know, I've got one in the whitehouse...and..uh...
Wait a second...
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
When filling out your tax returns?
Seastead this.
Bush has never been about anything other than serving his WASP masters.
THE LOOM
February 02, 2006 The Wisdom of Parasites
Posted by Carl Zimmer
I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty much collected the whole set. But until now I had somehow missed the gruesome glory that is a wasp named Ampulex compressa.
As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg's host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach's mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.
The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.
From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash.
The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.
The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon--which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.
I find this wasp fascinating for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it represents an evolutionary transition. Over and over again, free-living organisms have become parasites, adapting to hosts with exquisite precision. If you consider a full-blown parasite, it can be hard to conceive of how it could have evolved from anything else. Ampulex offers some clues, because it exists in between the free-living and parasitic worlds.
Amuplex is not technically a parasite, but something known as an exoparasitoid. In other words, a free-living adult lays an egg outside a host, and then the larva crawls into the host. One could easily imagine the ancestors of Ampulex as wasps that laid their eggs near dead insects--as some species do today. These corpse-feeding ancestors then evolved into wasps that attacked living hosts. Likewise, it's not hard to envision an Ampulex-like wasp evolving into full-blown parasitoids that inject their eggs directly into their hosts, as many species do today.
And then there's the sting. Ampulex does not want to kill cockroaches. It doesn't even want to paralyze them the way spiders and snakes do, since it is too small to drag a big paralyzed roach into its burrow. So instead it just delicately retools the roach's neural network to take away its motivation. Its venom does more than make roaches zombies. It also alters their metabolism, so that their intake of oxygen drops by a third. The Israeli researchers found that they could also drop oxygen consumption in cockroaches by injecting paralyzing drugs or by removing the neurons that the wasps disable with the
Many insects and arachnids paralyze or kill their prey with poison and lay eggs in, on, or near them. This is simply an interesting variation on that.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
There is a group of crabs called Sacculinae, which do the same to the crabs they are parasiting on.
The sacculina is a barnacle which grows on (or rather below) other crabs, squeezing and growing its so called rhizocephalae into the body of the host crab and trying to reach the brain of the crab. After the brain is reached, the host crab turns into a zombie, reacting on each command from the sacculina, even searching for a mate for the sacculina.
...isn't that what lobbyists do?
I should point out that the fungus in question might actually be a species of Cordyceps rather than Entomophthorales. There's a cool photo of a beetle that was killed by a parasitic fungus at bugguide.net.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
the roach genus is quite prolific and well distributed with only 2 or 3 considered pests. The same goes for wasps, and only a few specieses of the genus are considered pests. A whole lot more wasp species are grown as biological crop protection: the locate the caterpillar, lay an egg in it and watch while the new wasp eats its way out of the still living caterpillar. 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.
Unless Slashdot has a very high percentage of entymologists, I don't think it is that newsworthy for slashdot readers. BTW the submitter was flogging his own book it seems?
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Leucochloridium paradoxum is a worm which infects snails and turns them into zombies as well. The zombie snail crawls up vegitation where it can be seen by birds and the parasite causes the snails eye stalks to extend and pulsate to atract birds.
d oxum.htm
The birds then eat the eye stalks and become infected themselves. The worms lay eggs in the bird's digestive system and they are then spread by the birds excrement which the snails eat thus repeating the cycle of life for the parasite.
Rather creepy stuff.
http://people.smu.edu/eheise/Leucochloridium_para
burnin
This is the most sophisticated parasitic routine I have ever heard of, AFAICR. But I was reminded of David Attenborough's BBC TV series "Life in the Undergrowth", which I recently watched - it's available on DVD in the UK, and according to Amazon will be released in the USA at the beginning of May. That contains a few similar examples, including a small wasp whose grub parasitizes living spiders - the biter bit. Strongly recommended, like everything by "Whispering Dave".
Until he explained it, I did not know that wasps were among the oldest of insects, and that both ants and bees were descended from primitive wasps. That set me thinking about cockroaches, which also go back to the dawn of land life. I wondered whether they were, unlike most other bugs, immune to attack by wasps. I guess this article answers that question pretty decisively.
Ever wonder how you would cope with wasps the size of a human being? I know it should be physically impossible, but it's too good a scary idea to give up. "The Furies", by Keith Roberts, is a very good SF novel on that theme, which - unlike many such books - hasn't dated since the 1960s. To quote a review on amazon.co.uk, the Furies are "wasps with a 2 meter wingspan and mandibles like bolt-cutters". And, of course, they hunt in packs...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Now, if only I could do that to women, I might actually stand a chance of reproducing.
And then there's the sting. Ampulex does not want to kill cockroaches. It doesn't even want to paralyze them the way spiders and snakes do, since it is too small to drag a big paralyzed roach into its burrow. So instead it just delicately retools the roach's neural network to take away its motivation. Its venom does more than make roaches zombies. It also alters their metabolism, so that their intake of oxygen drops by a third.
This reminds me of a social dynamic between human employees and employers:
1. Employer doesn't want to kill the employee: check.
2. Employer doesn't want to paralize the employee: check.
3. Employer delicately takes away employee's self-motivation: check.
I bet the stuff about oxygen and metabolism is true as well.
I would mod him offtopic just because I'm just sick and tired of people, both sides, screaming and yelling about ID everytime there is a story about nature on slashdot.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Wasp (guy) injects neurotoxins (buys cocktails) into cockroach's brain (for a hot chick) turning it (her) into a zombie (an easy hot chick) and then leads it (her) back to it's nest (bachelor pad), lays eggs inside it (screws her without a rubber), and waits for eggs to hatch (shotgun wedding!).
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
As a biologist (molecular genetics), I would say that this is the side of evolution people in the field don't talk about. I don't think I've ever read any papers (doesn't mean it doesn't exist) in which a serious study has been taken to answer the question of how evolution can be a CREATIVE process. Here's what I mean:
Microevolution (the DNA mutations and their inheritance by the progeny) occurs all the time, I think we can all agree on this. Macroevolution and speciation on the other hand, is a very hand wavy thing. In macroevolution, new structures or functions are derived from an ancestor. All the widely cited example of evolution, may it be Darwin's finches or the peppered moths are variation of existing structures. In terms of DNA mutations, this may only take a few changes in the actual DNA sequences which regulate the expression (or the turning on) of certain genes. The probability of these mutation events is already pretty low, but one can imagine this happening.
However, the question in the original post of how single base-pair (bp) mutations can lead to an organism not having a given ability at all to having an ability to control the roaches involves invoking evolution as having a CREATIVE force. As an excercise, let's just imagine that we are trying to create a brand new smallish 100 amino acid neuro-peptide that can control the roach by evolution. If you start with some random DNA sequence and try to evolve a 300 bps (3 bps/aa). You will end up with a probability of 1/4^300 = 2.4x10^-181 chance of evolving that (ok it'll be a little higher because 1/4 of the DNA will already be the one you want). That's a pretty small probability in anyone's book. You also have to account for the fact that while you are trying create this protein, other things are getting mutated in your genome and probably killing off the larvae before they have a chance to pass down their genes. Since you have not created a fully functional gene yet, there is no selective advantage for this specific gene locus, and the half-evolved gene is just being carried along in the population at a very low frequency. This means that it is very easily lost in the population and you have to start over trying to create your gene again.
This is just for evolving the neuro-peptide. For the gene to function properly, you NEED regulatory DNA sequences that control the protein to be expressed in the right place (ie. the stinger). There are also a lot of other things that the protein needs to be delivered to the roaches' brain (like the entire secretory pathway). But let's not go into that.
So I hope one can see, that the probability for all these events to occur is very very low, I would say a mathematical improbablity. And this is just for ONE protein to function properly!
Don't get me wrong, I stare a lot at DNA sequence data, and some things make a convincing case for evolution. But again, it's just microevolution. For creation of new structures and functions, and speciation, a lot more is needed. Speciation is not an observable event, and neither is the formation of new structures. Before we go and hail evolution as the new dogma of the modern man, we need to take this into consideration. And teach it like it is: if the enterprise of science is the search for "the truth" we need to be open and admit the assumptions and the caveats in our hypothesis. And that's what macro-evolution is: an hypothesis.
Likewise, the grandparent's argument implies there IS a reason for suffering. Western religions are populated by such a bunch of crybaby four year olds.
Suffering just is. There's always something. The buddha noticed it two hundred years BC and noticed it's inescapable. But in the east, they don't assume some single creature is doing it deliberately; after all, it's not like it really matters.
He also noticed WE make the suffering worse but sitting there bitching about how wrong and unfair it all is, and going "Why? Why? Why?".
Thirdly he noticed we can make it quite a bit better.
Last he said the way to make it better is to quit wishing for things to be different. Once we give up these desires, suffering vanishes.
Westerners should think about these ideas more. At least it would be quieter.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon