8 ms·
How tiny wasps cope with being smaller than amoebas
- patdennis 14y agoThe wings are amazing. I'd really like to see a video of one of these in flight, although I imagine that would be a difficult thing to capture.
- riffraff 14y agothis is rather cool but just to nitpick "one single cell" does not always imply "small" there are a few which are visible to the naked eye (think eggs)
- tocomment 14y agoDo you have any references for the egg thing? I have a hard time picturing that? Aren't there individual cells inside a chicken egg (before it starts developing?)
- aidenn0 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immature_ovum#Size http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immature_ovum#Size Even bigger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia_ventricosa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia_ventricosa
- wazoox 14y agoNo, an ostrich cell really is a single cell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_yolk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_yolk
- tocomment 14y agoSo are you saying the whole yolk divides in half continually to form the embryo? Is there a cell membrane around the yolk?
- masklinn 14y ago> So are you saying the whole yolk divides in half continually to form the embryo? No, the yolk does not "divide", the developing embryo feeds on its content.
- nemo1618 14y agoWow, these little guys are incredible! I had no idea such complexity could evolve at that scale. I think these species deserve a mention in science classrooms.
- excuse-me 14y agoWell as long as you make it clear that they were created that size because God likes a challenge - rather than any sort of adaptation to their environment - that should be OK
- raganwald 14y agoHmmm, downvotes. Hey Fred! Get in here, and bring the spare sensor filaments. I think we have some sarcasm detectors on the fritz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poes_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poes_law
- JabavuAdams 14y agoEven so, it's just flame-bait.
- excuse-me 14y agoDoesn't HN let you see a poster's other posts/comments? My background should be pretty obvious! ps How many christian fundies post on HN anyway?
- vacri 14y agoHN is a fairly humourless place independent of religious leanings.
- username3 14y agoOnce science shows how they evolved, they will be more than welcome.
- 14y ago
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- PieSquared 14y agoAs I understood it, both the Paramecium and the amoeba have a single cell. The wasp has many. (I had to reread that a half-dozen times to figure that out...) Original: "It’s pictured next to a Paramecium and an amoeba at the same scale. Even though both these creatures are made up of a single cell, the wasp..."
- camtarn 14y agoThe Paramecium and amoeba, both of which are roughly the same size as the wasp, are single large cells; the wasp is multi-cellular.
- latch 14y agoBadly worded paragraph. I re-read it many times before I understood. The "both" refers to the Paramecium and the amoeba. It's saying that despite having all those other organs (and neurons), the wasp is actually smaller than the single-celled amoeba and paramecium. EDIT: Don't delete your comment. You won't be the only one with that question..it'll help others!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- raldi 14y agoWhat are the major technical barriers before we can identify the input and output channels to this insect's brain and start iterating through all possible input values, recording the corresponding output values? And once we can do that, could we use that data to fly a virtual insect around a virtual world?
- awt 14y agoThis was one of my first thoughts as well, sort of. Alternatively, is it possible to model each neuron when there are only around 8k? Maybe estimate the visual, audio, and tactile bandwidth of the wasp and feed the simulated neurons a stream of simulated environmental data and just let the connections evolve.
- tomp 14y agoThere are not many neurons, but there are many (too many) possible connections. To find the right ones, nature took several billion years. Even with the fastest computers, it would take a considerable amount of time (note that the lifetime of these wasps is a few weeks at most, so evolution happens very fast).
- pygy_ 14y agoI think we've yet to match the (information processing ability)/(energy consumption x size) ratio of wetware.
- Dylan16807 14y agoSure, but we can fire up a room full of servers instead.
- pygy_ 14y agoShort and consistent feedback latency is crucial for movement coordination. Think adapting to wind conditions and landing/liftoff in rough conditions.
- robrenaud 14y agoDoes anyone know how the nucleus destruction happens? Is there any analogy to regularization/sparsification in machine learning? Is there some kind of process that destroys the nucleus of the least useful neurons?
- pygy_ 14y agoThe hypothesis advanced by the article is that there is no loss of function. The neurons are packed with enough proteins to function for five days. The nuclei are just dead weight. In mammals, red blood cells don't have nuclei either and can live up to 90 days in physiologic conditions. Educated guess resp. nuclei destruction mechanism: probably through partial apoptosis (nucleus fragmentation), autophagia, and/or expulsion and phagocytosis by other cells.
- colanderman 14y agoOn the opposite side of things, here are some of the largest single-celled organisms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophyophore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophyophore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caulerpa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caulerpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia_ventricosa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia_ventricosa
- knowtheory 14y agoSo, this is really just an allegory about Minimum Viable Products, right?
- dllthomas 14y agoThe headline is a bit misleading, though. Amoebas seem to be just used as a reference point, where I kept expecting more salience - some adaptation of the wasp to deal specifically with the fact that it was smaller than an amoeba in particular, rather than just with the fact that it was small. Nevertheless, confusion aside, it's fascinating stuff!
- cs702 14y agoWow: with only 7,400 neurons (compared to 340,000 for the common housefly and 850,000 for honeybees), this wasp can somehow fly, search for food, find the right places to lay its eggs, etc. That ridiculously tiny neural network is one freakingly efficient computing device!
- Xcelerate 14y ago7,400 seems very capable of being simulated. In fact, that's a small enough number that I'll bet you could map those connections out by hand with some type of microscope. To someone more knowledgeable in this subset of biology, is this possible?
- masklinn 14y agoSee this link posted by "zb": http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/science/21brain.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/science/21brain.html?pagew...
- agravier 14y agoIt is possible, but the neurons are actually complex computing units that take a plethora of signals into account: subtle temporal behavior (relative timings of post and pre-synaptic activations), complex chemistry in the cell as well as the in the synaptic cleft, and many more less understood things. Secondly, as you can imagine, the connectivity is far from random. Like in larger nervous systems (or even more than in large pools or neurons), these computing units take precise roles, part due to the developmental process, part due to later stage learning. But in the end, the machinery is precise, and simulating it requires understanding all of it. I believe that this understanding should not come though imagery alone, but also through studies of the development of these organisms' brains. Like we are now forming artificial neural maps through "machine" learning techniques that are accelerated versions of their biological counterparts, I believe that we should develop developmental algorithms into large-scale simulations. The goals being to first understand how it works, second to see if the models are able to replicate the end result, a good indication that they are useful models. (I do research in computational neuroscience.)
- kjhughes 14y agoI find the implied range of cell sizes to be amazing. (Informally, it's tempting to view all microscopic biological entities as being similarly small; they're not.) Here's a cool visual of relative cell sizes and scale: http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/ http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/
- StavrosK 14y agoThe amoeba is as big as a grain of salt? It must be visible with the naked eye, then, no? I had no idea it was that big...
- Apocryphon 14y agoIs that wasp truly really small? Or is that amoeba just really big?