• About the blog
  • About Sedeer
  • Series
    • Words of Science
    • Discussions
    • Foraging
    • Natural Selection
    • QM Workshop
  • Contact me
  • Accumulating Glitches
  • Collective Marvelling

Inspiring Science

~ Casting light on great ideas

Inspiring Science

Tag Archives: manipulation

Become part of a research project about zombie ants!

21 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by sedeer in Arthropods, Disease, Hymenoptera, Insects, Microbiology

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Ant, ants, biology, Coryceps, crowd funding, fungus, manipulation, microbes, Microryza, mind control, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, Parasitism, Popular science, Research, science, science and society

zombie ant fungus (Photo credit: pennstatenews)I’ve written about mind-controlling parasites and I’ve also written about ants a couple of times, but for some reason I still haven’t written about the famous “zombie ants“. These fascinating, macabre little wonders are ants that have been infected by a fungus (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) which manipulates their behaviour. The fungus makes the ant climb up at plant stalk and bite into the underside of a leaf, clinging to it in a death grip. The fungus then kills the ant, consuming its innards before sending a reproductive stalk out through the corpse’s head.

I recently found out about an exciting research project looking into how the fungus manages its manipulation of the ant. Charissa de Bekker, a post-doc at Penn State University, is using Microryza to crowdfund her project, which will investigate what genes are active in the fungus’ manipulation of the ant. Since I think it’s an awesome project, I invited her to answer a few questions about herself and her work. Read on to find out what she has to say, and if you think the project sounds interesting or useful, consider backing it on Microryza — she’s got 11 days left to reach her goal! Continue reading →

Advertisements

The wasp and the cockroach: a zombie story

09 Thursday May 2013

Posted by sedeer in Arthropods, Hymenoptera, Insects

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Ampulex, behaviour, biology, Emerald cockroach wasp, manipulation, nature, parasite, Parasitism, Parasitoid, Parasitoid wasp, Popular science, science

Ampulex compressa, commonly called Emerald Cockroach Wasp. Pictured in Dar es salaam, Tanzania. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)The world of parasites is full of incredible tales of manipulation and mind-control as these creatures twist their hosts to their needs.  Ever since I first heard of parasitoid wasps, I’ve been drawn to them by a delicious mixture of schadenfreude and intellectual fascination.  (Technically, parasitoids are slightly different from parasites, but that’s not important right now.)  Some of the examples of manipulation by parasitoid wasps are just wonderfully, horribly macabre.  I briefly mentioned the emerald cockroach wasp in a previous post; this time I’ll give a few other examples and explain the emerald wasp more thoroughly.  Hopefully I’ll manage to share some of my excitement about these amazing creatures, which made Darwin once write: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a group of parasitoid wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or the cat should play with mice.”
Continue reading →

Search

Donate Button with Credit Cards
Follow @inspiringsci
Follow Inspiring Science on WordPress.com

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 2,099 other followers

RSS Feed RSS - Posts

Ongoing discussions

  • How To Get Rid of Ants (COMPLETE GUIDE) - Pest Strategies on How does an ant colony coordinate its behaviour?
  • Why Healthy Pregnancy Shapes the Newborn Gut Microbiome - DrStevenLin.com on Sex, hormones, and the microbiome
  • Sofia Esteves on Why you can’t stop – Eating & Addiction
  • sedeer on Why you can’t stop – Eating & Addiction
  • leighhecking on Why you can’t stop – Eating & Addiction
  • sedeer on The Origins of Ant Agriculture
  • Erin W on The Origins of Ant Agriculture
  • Fight back against junk food marketing | Inspiring Science on Why you can’t stop – Eating & Addiction

What’s popular now?

  • The Ten-legged Spider
  • Natural selection: On fitness
  • No secrets by the lakeside: how water affects sound
  • How does an ant colony coordinate its behaviour?
  • The bacteria that make it rain

Blogs to check out

  • Accumulating Glitches
  • alternative viewpoints
  • AntyScience
  • Baldscientist
  • Eyes on the Environment
  • Language Log
  • Letters of Note
  • naked capitalism
  • Raising My Rainbow
  • The Scorpion and the Frog
  • The Smaller Majority
Advertisements

Copyright

Creative Commons License
All text and original images by Sedeer El-Showk. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Thanks to

  • Arkadia International Bookshop
  • The Book Hive
  • The Television and Movie Store
  • Rönnels Antikvariat
Inspiring Science is part of:
  • Collective Marvelling
  • SciComm Network

I'm on ScienceSeeker-DNA

Nature
Blog Network

Categories

Archives

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel