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Seeing a large palm caterpillar seemingly OK at one moment, turning your head, and looking back to see it completely deflated as if a baloon, black goo oozing o
by xipho 3y ago
Seeing a large palm caterpillar seemingly OK at one moment, turning your head, and looking back to see it completely deflated as if a baloon, black goo oozing out, with upwards of 40 larvae anchored to it and spinning their heads around as they create cocoons is seriously eye opening.
Perhaps the most hyper-diverse group of animals in the world are the chalcid or jewel wasps. They don't sting, they lay their eggs in others, including others eggs (some eggs of things so small they were only recently proven to be the hosts), as parasitoids (things that kill their hosts). They are everywhere, it's trivial to catch them on any front lawn with the right techniques, yet the vast majority of people would never know they are there. The broader lineage include some species smaller than the largest amoebas.
If you want to see ecology in a nutshell look at fig wasps, absolutely insane, soldier-like males, blind, wingless, ant-like males of other species, variable length ovipositors that let them exploit all different micro-micro areas of a fig. Multiple inter-dependent species on one species of Fig? Sure, why not. It goes on ad-nauseam.
https://chalcid.org/ https://chalcid.org/ for a classic picture in our field.
- westmeal 3y agoBig Fig Wasps! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql5_q_33wqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql5_q_33wqY
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoWow, I didn't know about the fig wasps before. Beyond crazy cool! That level of coevolution is just so neat to me.
- animal_spirits 3y agoThere's a free documentary on Youtube called "The Queen of Trees" which goes over the lifecycle of an African Sycamore Fig Tree and follows the crazy amount of life that it supports over a year, including the lifecycle of the sycamore fig wasp. It's unbelievable, and deserves a watch by all who are interested in ecology. https://youtu.be/xy86ak2fQJM?si=CVL23tMUSEa28aBr https://youtu.be/xy86ak2fQJM?si=CVL23tMUSEa28aBr
- _0ffh 3y agoRead that one first in one of Dawkins' books, maybe Unweaving the Rainbow.
- cnity 3y agoParasite Rex is an amazing book for this kind of thing.
- xattt 3y agoThe fig symbiosism with wasps goes even further than that, since nematodes are also involved, and that they too are bespoke for their fig hosts. AFAIK, the nematodes help mediate wasp reproduction.
- edelans 3y agoThis is mindblowing. I found this YT video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovo_T0KqdYg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovo_T0KqdYg showing the whole life cycle of the jewel wasp. What impresses me the most is that the wasps are not trained to do that. They appear to "just know" what to do. Wow.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoOn my worst days I like to think "Well, at least I'm not a cockroach being eaten alive from the inside out, with my vital organs specifically spared long enough so I can survive as food for the thing eating me, by a parasitic wasp." And, quite seriously, the existence of this type of horrific parasitism precludes the existence of any sort of benevolent god in my mind. It's easy to imagine a million different universes where this sort of abysmal torture doesn't exist, and it only makes sense in the view of "uncaring" evolution.
- rightbyte 3y agoI'd think you'd need to add omnipotent though to be picky. Neither benovelent or omnipotent alone are ruled out.
- marcusverus 3y agoThis seems silly to me. Where is the line? Would a benevolent god prevent all parasitism? What about predation? Disease? Even if He were to do all of the above, horrific deaths would still be possible through injury, hunger, etc. Would a benevolent god prevent death and heterotrophy as well? If you were to ascend to the heavens and obtain dominion over all of the universe, would you spend your time meandering around the cosmos, exterminating species whose lifecycles struck you as "horrific"? Would this behavior make you more moral than a god who simply permitted nature to take its course?
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> Would this behavior make you more moral than a god who simply permitted nature to take its course? This makes no sense to me. Doesn't pretty much every major religion believe God created nature in the first place? Yes, if I were God, I would create a nature in which the horrific torture of innocent, sentient creatures was not possible. On the contrary, currently nature requires this horrific torture for creatures (the parasites) to simply survive in the first place. Stephen Fry puts it better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo
- api 3y agoTrivia: the xenomorph from Alien was inspired by parasitic wasps, because that’s exactly what they do to spiders or sometimes larger insects.