Carl Zimmer writes on a topic that fascinates him (and me, in a toe-curling way): the life of parasites. This time, it’s the group of parasitoid wasps callen the Ichneumonidae that gets the Zimmer treatment. Eye-opening reading. Even Charles Darwin found this aspect of Nature red in tooth and claw a little unsettling: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars."
The Ichneumonidae
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2 responses to “The Ichneumonidae”
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Fascinating. I read his piece on the wasp whose stings redirects the neural responses in a cockroach’s brain, killing its motivation and turning it into a pliant zombie that the wasp then leads to its lair and where it waits quietly to be chewed on from the inside out.
James Blunt songs do that to me. -
I don’t think that I have ever knowingly heard a James Blunt song. I don’t even know what he looks like. Perhaps I should keep it that way.
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