The Wisdom of Parasites. The Loom: A blog about life, past and future
As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it’s time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg’s host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach’s mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.
The wasp slips her stinger through the roach’s exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach’s brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.
I don’t have much more to say than wow at this point…
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on Friday, February 3rd, 2006 at 11:26 am and is filed under indiscriminate, science.
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February 4th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Me either, except maybe to say that it’s reassuring to realize that humans may have the potential, at least, for similar precision but with a more inclusive depth and span of consciousness? I lifted the depth and span idea from Ken Wilber, who also has a lot of thought-provoking ideas about the important present need to “identify, dis-identify, and integrate” Eastern and Western approaches to being. Reading your post about the wasp and the roach was a numinous experience for me. My first reaction was to gape in awe at what the Kosmos can create, and my second reaction was to ponder the (to me undeniable) fact that the Kosmos created each of us and all of us. What are the creative limits of the Kosmos, and what is our potential role in the creative process?
February 8th, 2006 at 8:16 am
I’m sorry to be squeamish, but am I the only one thinking “eew?”