like a dog on a leash (and the dracula ant)

schmoly flecks of phelgm! This is why i love carl zimmer so much. He's got a pechant for the parasites that makes any one so slightly uneasy to downright hurl-worthy disgusted. This time its Ampulex compressa, a parasitic wasp not unlike the ichineumon. Most just paralyse their prey and drag it down a burrow and lay eggs on them. This one dosent.

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 fucker 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 eats the roach.
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 im-beling-eaten-alive.




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.

Isnt it amazing just how things are so different (to the extents of beauty and repulsion) when we look at nature other than our ourselves? These insects, they operate on wholly different principles from us, and it is such diversity that makes this world truly, wonderfully, terribly, beautifully livable.


well, that's it for today's creature feature!

-YC out