Wasps are intense. Equipped with powerful toxins, they are most formidable and manipulative, especially when it comes to certain solitary species' insidious ways of raising their young by paralyzing and/or altering the host's behavior to enable the young to eat the host alive with little undo effort.
“I’ve been working on parasitoid wasps for a very long time,” remarked Jack Werren, a professor of biology at the University of Rochester. His fascination with these animals centers on their specialized venoms, which allow the wasps to be masterful physiological puppeteers. Parasitoid wasps are an enormous group of between 100,00 and 600,000 species that are parasitic when they are larvae, living on or frequently inside a host they eat alive. As free-living adults, they must find and subdue an appropriate creature to play host to their young, which they do with the aid of behavior-altering venoms. The emerald cockroach wasp, for example, transforms its formidable targets — cockroaches many times its size — into complacent meals for the wasps’ hungry offspring by manipulating the animals’ brain chemistry. The Glyptapanteles wasp goes even further, turning its caterpillar offerings into zombie bodyguards that protect the young wasps that have just eaten their way out of the caterpillars’ tissues. Another wasp, Reclinervellus nielseni, forces its arachnid victims to transform their webs into sturdy nests that will continue to protect the wasp larvae after the spiders expire.
Nature never ceases to amaze ...
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