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Cockroaches use ancient kung fu mastery to combat zombie apocalypse
- Thread starter Zen
- Start date
Wasps do this with caterpillars too. Larvae hatch inside the caterpillar's skin, invade its nervous system, force the caterpillar to keep eating so that it can feed the larvae, then they burst out of the caterpillar and eat its corpse.
Parasitic wasps are the coolest and more horrifying insects. They're probably the area of study I'd have gone into if I didn't pick computer science instead of entomology in school.
The jewel wasp is crazy. When was the first wasp to figure that shit out? How many millenia of trial and error? Questions I'll never know the answers to.
"Cockroaches aren't beloved by many, but you have to feel sorry for them once they get snagged by a jewel wasp."
No, I don't
No, I don't
On the contrary. The worst of them will be the last ones standing.
No, I expect roaches to outlive pretty much everything else on this planet. The little fucks resist radiation
An AI machine colony that perpetuates and fuels itself by devouring organic matter is pretty much the only way roaches are ever going extinct.
Nature never ceases to amaze. I hope Attenborough gets to narrate about a Jewel Wasp (or a different kind of parasitic wasp) in a future series. He has a way of even the strangest of animals seeming compellingly attractive, and I need to know if it can work on these things.
Man, this editing is awful, i'm glad we still got BBC for good documentaries
Jewel wasps don't zombify the cockroaches, they actually cause an extreme depression, hence the "docile nature" allowing them to be guided by their antennae & refusal to move as they're being eaten alive. I feel like this is an important distinction & is far more interesting than just going "lol zombies" again.
Man, the only other Jasper fan it feels like there is on the Internet... And then you go & hate on bugs like that. I feel betrayed.
Man, the only other Jasper fan it feels like there is on the Internet... And then you go & hate on bugs like that. I feel betrayed.
Er... Wait. Nevermind. I mistakenly believed this was the case, but the cockroach stops producing octopamine, which I mistook for being like dopamine but it's actually more like norepinephrine. Guess it proves that not everything that rhymes easily is actually related!
But yeah. It's more that its fight or flight reflex is turned off. Reading further, the cockroach is also paralyzed for a time so the wasp can sting a precise point on the ganglia responsible for octopamine production, & after dragging the cockroach by the antennae, the wasp eats most of the antennae. Not all, but most. It's like if somebody stabbed your eyeballs but only did enough damage so that you could still almost see. My bad about the erroneous information. The point I'm trying to make here is that wasps are destructive parasites, & although I understand they serve a role in the ecosystem, I'm happy to see these cockroaches fighting back.
It's the ovipositor, aka the stinger. The combination of a long ovipositor with a flexible abdomen connection (The signature "wasp waist") basically allows wasps to lay their eggs wherever their butt can stick.
All wasps, ants, and bees are descendants of a single very successful parasitoid ancestor.
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Here's an Attenborough clip that covers both oak gall wasps and their parasitoids.
Rookie mistake.
Thanks for the info. :)
This shit is so badass. The snail thing might be even cooler, honestly. And I knew about the cuckoo but that is fuckin' messed up.