Wasp Larvae Feed on Zombie Roaches 435
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."
More proof.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More proof.. (Score:2)
Thanks for starting my day with a laugh.
Re:More proof.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parasitism was one of the reasons that Charles Darwin lost his faith in later years. How could a loving God create so much suffering?
Re:More proof.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More proof.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More proof.. (Score:2, Funny)
Well, obviously the cockroach was a sinner. It doesn't happen to cockroaches who are good and don't commit sins.
Repend! Repend! Or W.A.S.P.s will lay eggs in your brain.
Re:More proof.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Do not presume that if humans do not know the reason behind the suffering that there is no reason. That suffering is somehow always evil and to be avoided.
Attach the butterfly effect to
Reasons for suffering? (Score:3, Informative)
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 goin
Re:Reasons for suffering? (Score:3, Interesting)
Crybabies? Quieter? Who exactly are you trying to criticize? Medical researchers? Sick people? Charities that try to raise money for medical research or otherwise help the less fortunate?
My mom happens to be a devout buddhist and is part of a local buddhist group that focuses on environmentalism, charity, etc. Wanting to alleviate suffering has nothing to do with believing that some malevolent force is behind it. It may be convenient to believe that the suffering of others is part of some great plan that
Re:More proof.. (Score:3, Funny)
But he did give us one -- his name, however it is you pronounce it.
Re:More proof.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:More proof.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More proof.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you'd enjoy reading The End of Pascal's Wager [infidels.org]. I came to the same conclusion a long time ago, but Richard Carrier knows how to word things without sounding like an idiot...
Re:More proof.. (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, right. Tell that to the millions who die from unpleasant parasitic diseases each year - "Your suffering is only subjective".
Mode parent down (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mode parent down (Score:3, Insightful)
not the roach or wasp as you know them (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:not the roach or wasp as you know them (Score:2)
Re:not the roach or wasp as you know them (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re:not the roach or wasp as you know them (Score:3, Interesting)
It's also undeniably amazing that they get to control roaches like that. For me that is the most interesting part, not the goal they have but the means they're able to perform.
Re:More proof.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:More proof.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More proof.. (Score:3, Funny)
Now... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Now... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Now... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Now... (Score:3, Funny)
I KNOW I KNOW OOO I KNOW (Score:2, Offtopic)
No need to rent Kingdom of the Spiders! (Score:5, Funny)
MMM! (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, I think I detect an IgNobile prize winner here.
Re:MMM! (Score:5, Insightful)
Won't someone please think of the roaches? (Score:3, Interesting)
Remote controlled roaches [wireheading.com]
Although I think that roaches will eventually rise up and rebel using their roach controlled robots [conceptlab.com].
Real-Live Goa'uld (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Real-Live Goa'uld (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Real-Live Goa'uld (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Real-Live Goa'uld (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Real-Live Goa'uld (Score:3, Insightful)
sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)
Re:sounds familiar (Score:4, Funny)
Re:sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Informative)
The brain-eating cliché came from Return of the Living Dead, which had nothing to do with Romero's movie, save for a producer involved, I believe.
To be quite honest, I thought this wasp had stronger horror movie ties to the Alien series, and was probably even a dir
I just moved to New York City (Score:5, Funny)
SUCK IT YOU FUCKING ROACHES!
I feel better now.
Re:I just moved to New York City (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I just moved to New York City (Score:3, Funny)
Welcome (Score:5, Funny)
... I knew a girl (Score:3, Funny)
... who did the same sort of thing -- well, sorta :-)
Regards
John
Re:... I knew a girl (Score:2)
Use This Mirror (Score:3, Informative)
Not really new... (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Re:Not really new... (Score:5, Informative)
You're thinking of Dicrocoelium dendriticum, the sheep liver fluke. The eggs get passed out in the feces, and are eaten by a snail. The snail sheds a second-stage larvae, which is eaten by an ant. The parasite causes the ant to become negatively geotropic - it climbs up onto the grass - and is eaten by the sheep, where it grows into an adult and starts the whole process over.
Re:Not really new... (Score:3, Funny)
...Profit!!
Re:Not really new... (Score:4, Interesting)
Rabies causes extreme aggression in most mammals, causing them to infect another host by biting. There is a parasitic worm which causes grasshoppers to jump into water, where the worm's larvae have to live.
This is exceptional because the wasp's stinger is actually inserted into a precise area of the brain of the victim, and because the wasp can actually steer the victim by stimulating it's antennae (I believe the same system has been tested on cockroaches by humans; they move away from the stimulated side by a protective reflex). Your ant parasite almost certainly doesn't have a sufficiently advance neural system to actually guide the ant upwards, rather it probably induces this behaviour by chemically triggering some signal the ant would use for more useful behaviour, the same way rabies causes dogs to pass on saliva by becoming aggressive.
The world is a scary place... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The world is a scary place... (Score:5, Informative)
But it sounds like this type of adaptive mechanism is more common than you would think. Quite amazing actually - 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? Very bizarre.
Re:The world is a scary place... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:The world is a scary place... (Score:2)
Re:The world is a scary place... (Score:3, Funny)
"To view a video of the parasite and grasshopper in action, which includes a brief interview, in French..."
An interview with a parasite-infected grasshopper moments before death? in FRENCH? Now THAT is journalism, my friends!
more about fungi and ants (Score:5, Informative)
I should point out that the fungus in question might actually be a species of Cordyceps rather than Entomophthorales. There's a cool photo [bugguide.net] of a beetle that was killed by a parasitic fungus at bugguide.net.
Re:The world is a scary place... (Score:2)
And I remember a BBC documentary on which there were some bugs which used 3 different type of animals to reproduce! Snails, goats and ants, see here: http://www.weichtiere.at/Mollusks/Schnecken/parasi tismus/dicrocoelium.html [weichtiere.at]
And they take control of the ants so that it can be easily eaten by goats.
I was truly bewildered when I watched this BBC documentary, it's really incredible: no book author would write something
Sucks they're so efficient..... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sucks they're so efficient..... (Score:2)
I can't believe nobody has said it yet... (Score:5, Funny)
*Turns on microphone - tweeeeeeet -*
*ahem ahem*
Ready?
Braaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiinnnsssssssss....
*Ducks*
Re:I can't believe nobody has said it yet... (Score:2)
Here's some topical ointment. And for God's sake, don't touch you're eye!
Not efficient? (Score:2)
That might be dangerous, though.
Slashdotted. Here is article text. (Score:4, Informative)
Lunch (Score:2, Funny)
Awsome! (Score:3, Funny)
Wait a second...
Re:Awsome! (Score:5, Funny)
The problem with your plan is that you are forgetting that your host must be in posession of a brain: it won't work on politicians...
Did you ever feel like a zombie roach? (Score:5, Funny)
TEXT BODY (Score:5, Informative)
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
Other parasites with similar capabilities (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parallels... (Score:5, Funny)
More zombie madness (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Hardly News (Score:2)
Best parasitic wasp story yet... (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
As Kent Brockman would say... (Score:2)
reminds me of a Sapolsky article... (Score:2)
Original paper here (Score:2, Informative)
They also describe an interesting middle phase of the wasp attack which was not mentioned in the summary: after the brain injection, the roach furiously "grooms" itself for 30 minutes. They also note that the zombie behavior takes about 30 mins to take hold. Thus there's a possibility that the intense "itch" in the cockroach keeps it in the same place until its escape reflex ha
Not very PC (Score:2, Funny)
ENOUGH with the ethnic slurs already!
If only... (Score:3, Funny)
hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Toxoplasmosis (Score:3, Interesting)
"Toxoplasma is one of a number of parasites which require alteration of host's behaviour for their life cycle[1]. The changes observed are likely due to the presence of cysts in the brain, which produce or induce production of a neurotransmitter, possibly dopamine[2], therefore acting similarly to dopamine reuptake inhibitor type antidepressants. A slightly increased car accident rate, and reaction time slowed by a few percent have been observed (specifically, the infected lose concentration more quickly than the controls in the second and third minute)[3]. "If our data are true then about a million people a year die just because they are infected with toxoplasma," the researcher Jaroslav Flegr told The Guardian[4]. The data shows that the risk decreases with time after infection, however all older drivers are generally able to compensate for longer reaction time[5]. Ruth Gilbert, medical coordinator of the European Multicentre Study on Congenital Toxoplasmosis, told BBC News Online these findings could be due to chance, or due to social and cultural factors associated with toxoplasma infection[6]. Studies argue about the influence of the parasite on personality. There are claims of toxoplasma causing antisocial attitude in men and promiscuity[7] (or even signs of higher intelligence[8]) in women, and greater susceptibility to schizophrenia and manic depression[9] in all infected persons. A review of research focused on the schizophrenia connection confirms an association but does not confirm a causal relationship [10]."
Maybe women like cats because their toxoplasmosis infections make them smarter! Or maybe it's just because women can identify with creatures that are obsessed with their appearance, are impossible to understand, predict, or order around, and look down their nose in scorn at all of the huffing and panting and howling and slobbering we direct at them...
Sounds like human behavior at the singles bar.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:slasdot (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hybrid (Score:2)
Re:Evolved (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Evolved (Score:3, Interesting)
Wl, the first phase is obvious. It's the second phase that seems damn improbable.
A wasp mutates to inject neurotoxin into roach's ass. No effect.
A wasp mutates to inject neurotoxin into roach's leg. No effect.
(a hundred more variations till the wasp injects neurotoxin into the brain)
A wasp mutates to inject neurotoxin into roach's brain. Roach dies.
A wasp mutates to inject neurotoxin into roach's brain, other area. Roach dies.
A wasp mutates to inject neurotoxin into roach's brain, other area. Roach dies.
A w
Re:Evolved (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Evolved (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Evolved (Score:2)
That's the same question I keep asking about Cheney!
It's quite simple... (Score:2, Funny)
Evolution involves random genetic mutations which build up over time. The individual bits of DNA (G,A,T,C) are jumbled and switched around. Thus it is, that this wasp's predecessor, Ampulex gompresst, through two such mutations, becomes Ampulex compressa. Any questions?
Re:Evolved (Score:2, Informative)
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 egg
Re:Evolved (Score:2)
I would be curteous to a layman who asks about my profession rather than looking down upon his Puny Mortal Self.
Re:Evolved (Score:3)
Not only do biologists not have all the answers... they don't always even agree with each other.
here's a copy with a pic on boingboing (Score:2)
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/03/wasp_perform