Matthew sent in this latest “True Facts” video from Ze Frank; it’s about some of the most amazing and nefarious insects around: parasitoid wasps. (There’s an ad in the middle.)
There are a lot of questions and “I don’t know” answers here. The gall wasps are especially fascinating from an evolutionary viewpoint, as they somehow modify a plant’s gene expression to make the plant grow a gall that can house the wasp.
We don’t know how they do this, but even the gall wasps inside their houses can themselves be parasitized by other species of gall wasps (Again, we don’t know how these “hyperparasitoids” detect and find a larval host inside a gall). Finally, we don’t understand how natural selection has modified a parasitoid wasp so that it injects stuff into its host that modifies the host’s behavior, making iot a “zombie host.”
The photography is amazing; it seems to get better with every one of ZeFrank’s videos.
Do watch this; you’ll learn some natural history and, I hope, be amazed at the achievements of natural selection.