097: Beaten To The Punch By Evolution
There is a species of parasitic wasp that lays its larvae in the body of the orb spider. The spider is stung by the female wasp and is paralyzed while the egg is laid. Once the poison wears off, the spider goes about its business while the newly hatched wasp larva feeds on it, sucking its very lifeblood in order to nourish the new life.
In about 14 days, the young wasp is ready to wrap itself in a cocoon and pupate into a full adult. However, it's just a larva -- just a piece of jelly with teeth -- and it has no way of making its own cocoon. Fortunately, mom has provided for her youngster and a delayed chemical payload goes off in the spider's brain and the spider spins a completely different web one night, a web that has only one purpose: providing a cocoon for its parasitical companion. The tiny larva waits until the spider is done, kills and eats the spider, and then crawls off into its new home and pupates.
Fucking hell. The orb spider not only carries the little bastard but he weaves a web for it and then patiently returns to be cut up for chow. William Eberhard, who first wrote about this in Nature, discovered that, if the larva was removed before it could kill the spider, the spider would live its life as if nothing had happened.
As if it hadn't be reprogrammed for one evening to build something completely alien to its nature.
The brain, when you get right down to it, is just a series of chemical interactions. Signals come in, signals come out. It's all a matter of formulae, signals and responses built and coded by something we like to call "consciousness." But it's just code, right? Anyone can write code and, if it is inserted properly, can you really tell if it is viral or just your own signal?
The wasp venom inserts a chemical payload that recodes the spider to the wasp's bidding for one night of its life.
And to think that I thought the whole idea of reprogramming the brain through the use of some primal linguistic tool was far-fetched. Turns out it's old news in the natural world.
[Thanks, Dad, for pointing this one out.]
writing
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.
THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.
SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.
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