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It was my rudimentary understanding that Lamarckian inheritance had been debunked; how else then could such precise knowledge of a cockroach's neurological functions have been passed on to the subsequent generation from the primary generation whence such a technique was first employed?
Can someone with state-of-the-art knowledge of biology explain how in the world something like this could have evolved? It was my rudimentary understanding that Lamarckian inheritance had been debunked; how else then could such precise knowledge of a cockroach's neurological functions have been passed on to the subsequent generation from the primary generation whence such a technique was first employed?
While a number of venomous animals paralyze prey as live food for their young, Ampulex compressa is different in that it initially leaves the roach mobile and modifies its behavior in a unique way.
This suggests to me that the ancestors of this wasp would simply paralyze the roach and lay eggs inside, and this behaviour evolved from that.
With photo at: http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2006/02/02/the_wisdom_of_parasi...
"I have a suggestion for how this evolved. The initial sting to the cockroach would obviously make the cockroach's escape part of its brain light up like crazy. If the wasp then goes to find the most active part of the cockroaches brain, i'd imagine this would be the escape area. I believe there are simple rules which build up to create complex systems. These simple rules, like the active neuron sensor, help to create shortcuts to how a creature evolves. If you look at the recent darpa challenge, involving the teaching of a car how to drive across unfamiliar terrain, it managed to convince the team it was working by using just the rule of keeping the grass equally distant on the right and the left. It hit a bridge and swerved so the guy onboard had to grab the wheel! But the point is simple rules can lead to complex seeming actions." Posted by: Rob Levy | February 4, 2006 4:28 PM
> Over a period of eight days, the wasp larva consumes the roach's internal organs in an order which guarantees that the roach will stay alive, at least until the larva enters the pupal stage and forms a cocoon inside the roach's body. Instances of 'inborn intelligence' never cease to amaze me. How in the world do the larvae know in which order to eat the organs?! If you have an instinct that is pretty low-level (say…
Suppose you have two variations of a gene; one produces larvae that prefer the taste of a vital organ, and eat that one first. The other variation prefers the taste of a less important organ, eating that first and eating the important organ only when it has exhausted its preferred option. If the second one is on average 5% more likely to complete its growing before the roach dies and its food supply rots, the second…
Maybe larvae just consumes a little of every organ it can get to. The whole story about it consuming non-essential organs first seems quite fishy - how many of those do cockroaches have anyway? Even if that's true, after eating away few organs you pretty sure to get organism failure no matter what order. Doesn't seem very smart strategy to me.
This is as close as is gets in real life to the movie 'Alien'. Was Ridley Scott inspired by this in some way?
Can someone with state-of-the-art knowledge of biology explain how in the world something like this could have evolved? It was my rudimentary understanding that Lamarckian inheritance had been debunked; how else then could such precise knowledge of a cockroach's neurological functions have been passed on to the subsequent generation from the primary generation whence such a technique was first employed?
I don't have state-of-the-art knowledge of biology, but you'll note from the article While a number of venomous animals paralyze prey as live food for their young, Ampulex compressa is different in that it initially leaves the roach mobile and modifies its behavior in a unique way. This suggests to me that the ancestors of this wasp would simply paralyze the roach and lay eggs inside, and this behaviour evolved from…
That would be backwards evolution.
From the scienceblog link:
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.
With photo at: http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2006/02/02/the_wisdom_of_parasi...
The comment thread on this article is over 200 posts. Mostly a heated creationist vs evolunist debate, but there is some interesting reading in there. It is hard not to ponder how such a complex set of behaviors came to be through natural selection alone. However, one comment that I found particularly on point is posted below: "I have a suggestion for how this evolved. The initial sting to the cockroach would obvious…