The wonderful world of insects
delanceyplace.com
The wonderful world of insects
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Re: The wonderful world of insects
#2To borrow a line from Spock: 'Fascinating...'
Re: The wonderful world of insects
#3"The big question here is how the wasp mother can control the ladybug, transforming her into a zombie babysitter... The answer is that the wasp mother injects the ladybug not just with the egg but also with a virus. "
This strengthens my belief that insects are like tiny little robots.
Re: The wonderful world of insects
#4Has anyone read this book? I've been having a craving these days for books on animals, having just finished "The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs", and this looks pretty good.
Re: The wonderful world of insects
#5"The big question here is how the wasp mother can control the ladybug, transforming her into a zombie babysitter... The answer is that the wasp mother injects the ladybug not just with the egg but also with a virus. " This strengthens my belief that insects are like tiny little robots.
Maybe, but that just makes us bigger, more complicated robots because we too have our behavior influenced by parasites and viruses.
Re: The wonderful world of insects
#6"The big question here is how the wasp mother can control the ladybug, transforming her into a zombie babysitter... The answer is that the wasp mother injects the ladybug not just with the egg but also with a virus. " This strengthens my belief that insects are like tiny little robots.
Maybe, but that just makes us bigger, more complicated robots because we too have our behavior influenced by parasites and viruses.
Imagine a virus that makes you switch careers, heh.
Re: The wonderful world of insects
#7Some tiny wasps are used for pest control in farms, natural and clean way
Re: The wonderful world of insects
#8"The big question here is how the wasp mother can control the ladybug, transforming her into a zombie babysitter... The answer is that the wasp mother injects the ladybug not just with the egg but also with a virus. " This strengthens my belief that insects are like tiny little robots.
The really interesting question is why don't we see these amazingly detailed and precise parasitic mechanisms elsewhere, like in mammals? Are we just doing a terrible job of finding them, or is there something more interesting going on? Del Giudice recently published a paper arguing that the baroque complexity of non-insect nervous systems may in part be an anti-parasite mechanism, by making it too hard for a distributed group of small simple parasites to find hacks: "Invisible Designers: Brain Evolution Through the Lens of Parasite Manipulation" https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/selection/2019-delguidic... , Del Giudice 2019 (discussion: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/19/maybe-your-zoloft-stop... ).
Re: The wonderful world of insects
#9"The big question here is how the wasp mother can control the ladybug, transforming her into a zombie babysitter... The answer is that the wasp mother injects the ladybug not just with the egg but also with a virus. " This strengthens my belief that insects are like tiny little robots.
The really interesting question is why don't we see these amazingly detailed and precise parasitic mechanisms elsewhere, like in mammals? Are we just doing a terrible job of finding them, or is there something more interesting going on? Del Giudice recently published a paper arguing that the baroque complexity of non-insect nervous systems may in part be an anti-parasite mechanism, by making it too hard for a distrib…
Toxoplasmosis is (not) your friend here [0]
[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/toxoplasmosis...
Re: The wonderful world of insects
#10"The big question here is how the wasp mother can control the ladybug, transforming her into a zombie babysitter... The answer is that the wasp mother injects the ladybug not just with the egg but also with a virus. " This strengthens my belief that insects are like tiny little robots.
Maybe, but that just makes us bigger, more complicated robots because we too have our behavior influenced by parasites and viruses.
I remember to have read somewhere that viruses make you sneeze so that they can proliferate. But maybe that's just BS....