of puppet masters and vampires
Justto fill up empty space and waste precious time...
I was surfing the vast reaches of internet space when i came across these two juicy bits of grossity, bug-style. The first one's featured in Carl Zimmer's The Loom, by the way.
So one walks along the garden on a fine summer day, sniffing flowers and watching the butterflies flutter. Suddenly a wasp, beautiful and glimmering in the sun, zooms to you and hovers just in front of your face, as if scrutinizing you, then buzzes off to some other busy errand. Its called Ampulex compressa, and it has a deadly agenda.
A large number of wasps are predatory, and most hunt for caterpillars or spiders to feed their young.
Most just paralyse their prey and drag it down a burrow and lay eggs on them. This one takes it a step further. Because the roach is too big for it to drag, it evolved a wholly new way to get its prey into its nest of doom.
It first jabs its stinger down a cockroach in the midsection.
This makes the roach's front legs buckle, allowing the wasp to leisurely snake its stinger now INTO the roach's brain and inject another neurotoxin, taking down its escape response, and susceptible to control.
Next, the wasp climbs atop the roach, and guides the doomed roach by its antennaes into a ready dug burrow.She lays an egg on the zombiefied roach. It does not resist, fight or flee.
The egg hatches.
The Larvae enters roach.
The larvae munches roach innards.
The larvae pupates inside roach.
And the zombiefied roach remains vividly alive and aware all this while.
And finally, from the midsection, in classic ALIENS style, the chestburster emerges and begins another lifecycle of eating, mating and making zombies out of roaches.So the next time you step on a roach, consider it an act of mercy. Better instantaneous squish than long slow vivid death.
On the other hand, a further relative of the wasp, the ant, has another creepy species up its sleeves. Dubbed the "Dracula Ant", adults will catch and chew on their young larvae until they bleed, and feed on the hemolymph (insect blood) that leaks out. They feed soley on this blood (cant take on solid foods), and usually take enough to sustain themselves without killing their young.
Well, usually.
The young larvae feed like normal ants on solid food brought back by the adults (ie paralysed prey, much like how wasps do it), and have been observed to run and hide when they sense an adult entering their chamber. No, i wouldnt want to be in that family.
well, that's it for today's creature feature!
-YC out
I was surfing the vast reaches of internet space when i came across these two juicy bits of grossity, bug-style. The first one's featured in Carl Zimmer's The Loom, by the way.
So one walks along the garden on a fine summer day, sniffing flowers and watching the butterflies flutter. Suddenly a wasp, beautiful and glimmering in the sun, zooms to you and hovers just in front of your face, as if scrutinizing you, then buzzes off to some other busy errand. Its called Ampulex compressa, and it has a deadly agenda.
A large number of wasps are predatory, and most hunt for caterpillars or spiders to feed their young.
Most just paralyse their prey and drag it down a burrow and lay eggs on them. This one takes it a step further. Because the roach is too big for it to drag, it evolved a wholly new way to get its prey into its nest of doom.
It first jabs its stinger down a cockroach in the midsection.
This makes the roach's front legs buckle, allowing the wasp to leisurely snake its stinger now INTO the roach's brain and inject another neurotoxin, taking down its escape response, and susceptible to control.
Next, the wasp climbs atop the roach, and guides the doomed roach by its antennaes into a ready dug burrow.She lays an egg on the zombiefied roach. It does not resist, fight or flee.
The egg hatches.
The Larvae enters roach.
The larvae munches roach innards.
The larvae pupates inside roach.
And the zombiefied roach remains vividly alive and aware all this while.
And finally, from the midsection, in classic ALIENS style, the chestburster emerges and begins another lifecycle of eating, mating and making zombies out of roaches.So the next time you step on a roach, consider it an act of mercy. Better instantaneous squish than long slow vivid death.
On the other hand, a further relative of the wasp, the ant, has another creepy species up its sleeves. Dubbed the "Dracula Ant", adults will catch and chew on their young larvae until they bleed, and feed on the hemolymph (insect blood) that leaks out. They feed soley on this blood (cant take on solid foods), and usually take enough to sustain themselves without killing their young.
Well, usually.
The young larvae feed like normal ants on solid food brought back by the adults (ie paralysed prey, much like how wasps do it), and have been observed to run and hide when they sense an adult entering their chamber. No, i wouldnt want to be in that family.
well, that's it for today's creature feature!
-YC out
1 Comments:
Eeks. This is why it's very scary for me to do terrestrial stuff.
I hope soon, we can drag you away from flies and other dung denizens that seem to have taken over your life.
And come out with us to play in the big wild sea! Where the worst that could happen is to step on a stonefish.
Nothing I know of there has a biological mission to burrow into us to lay eggs. Or to drink our fluids.
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