I have always had a thing about bees and wasps. It never made sense to me. They’re entities less than the size of my thumb who couldn’t possibly hurt me more than the discomfort I put up with for a tattoo, and yet when they come flying by I get antsy. I’ve chalked it up to the notion that I have personal space issues. If people are too huggy, I’m just as likely to swat them as I am an ant or spider who carelessly wandered onto my leg. And I don’t feel at all bad about that. Billions of years of evolution and bugs still can’t tell if I’m a plant or not? Sorry, folks, but I am all for natural selection.
However, I’ve always been fascinated by the dark side of bugs. If they were made by God, as I had once upon a time thought, then how could the crawlies of the world be so darned nasty? At first it was things like trapdoor spiders that caught my attention. What would they have done back in the days of the Garden of Eden, when man and animals were all super happy and sang songs together and nobody ate anybody else? Did they just figure out one day after Eve bit the apple that hiding behind a trap door and launching at your prey is a good hunting strategy? Is this behavior learned or instinctive?
Then there was my first encounter in a book with ichneumons, that branch of wasp that embodies yucky better than any other animal I’ve ever heard of. I forget now where I had read about the tarantula wasp, but the image of their behavior definitely gave me the willies. For those who don’t know, what they do is paralyze a tarantula and then lay their eggs on top of it. The tarantula has to sit and wait until the larvae hatch, and then they devour it. This is a shit state of affairs for the tarantula, who is alive but unable to do things like play dodgeball or eat food, waiting for the inevitable mouths of his devourers to awaken.
Recently I read Stephen Jay Gould’s essay Nonmoral Nature in a book called The Sacred Beetle And Other Great Essays In Science. This essay talks about how ichneumons are a good example of the problem of evil from the human perspective. If we imagine a benign and loving creator who has designed all life on the planet, how then does one look at the behavior of ichneumons and not question the character of that creator? For me, it’s the endoparasitic ichneumons who are all the more grotesque, laying their eggs inside their not-so-paralyzed prey so that they might hatch inside and gorge themselves, instinctively knowing how to eat the non-essentials first to keep the meal alive as long as possible.
Ew. Or better yet, ew.
And today I read a great article on the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog at Discover Blogs entitled Ambush ants capture giant prey using Velcro principles which talks about the Azteca andrea ant, and includes a video of them ambush-attacking a moth. The behavior has been understood for ages, but the particulars of how the ants are able to use their claws to attach to the Cecroptia otbusa plant’s leaves with very similar properties to velcro to allow them to properly trap and kill their prey, who are many times their size, is all fairly new.
And nature has reminded me of another vile little insect parasite, the mosquito. I have a large and mean-spirited mosquito bite on my left elbow from some hideous female vampire. The saliva she left behind has triggered a histamine reaction for me, and a highly annoying itch is the end result.
Then there’s really gross Leucochloridium paradoxum, the flatworm that parasitizes snails. If you’re curious, here’s a life cycle of the little bastards from Wired Magazine that goes into great detail, or you could just watch the video on youtube.
Yeah, bugs are gross. But they’re also really interesting, and a great counter to creationists. And this is only a handful of the gross things they do. There’s bees who cook hornets, hornets who whup butt on bees, fungus that makes ants into zombies… You name it, if it’s nasty, it’s out there.
Hope you enjoyed today’s dose of the gross.
Jim
