Via “P.Z.”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/chest_bursters.php (but put under the fold so as to protect the delicate sensibilities of CT’s readership).
The footage of the larvae in the caterpillar’s body is creepy and astonishing. This all brings back unfortunate memories from my boyhood in rural Ireland, when I liked to catch tadpoles, caterpillars etc, to see them grow to maturity. One day, I noticed that a few promising-seeming Cabbage White caterpillars had become unusually sluggish, and that their skin was beginning to bulge and distend in very peculiar ways. And then the little ‘uns started to make their way out (they were a very faint primrose yellow if my memory serves me correctly, and longer and thinner than the ones depicted in this footage). I’m sure the experience marked me …
{ 18 comments }
Matt Heath 05.19.09 at 2:09 pm
The best thing about this is that the wasps/larvae have a co-evolved mind-control virus.
Bill Gardner 05.19.09 at 2:15 pm
So why do Christians want to believe in intelligent design? Close observation of nature suggests that if there is a mind at work, it has a diabolical side.
ajay 05.19.09 at 2:20 pm
2: Darwin thought the same thing, about the same creatures – the ichneumon wasps: “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain could write on the wasteful blundering low & horribly cruel works of Nature!”
Colin Danby 05.19.09 at 2:50 pm
Carl Zimmer’s _Parasite Rex_ (Free Press, 2001) is highly recommended along these lines. We might also ask why the yuck — is there an idea about the integrity of the body that’s disturbed by things living in things?
om 05.19.09 at 3:53 pm
“is there an idea about the integrity of the body that’s disturbed by things living in things?”
um… yes.
bert 05.19.09 at 4:02 pm
Who made this?
I remember when the BBC in Bristol produced this sort of stuff, or outsourced it from outfits like Oxford Scientific Films, they placed great emphasis on getting it for real. But the footage from inside the caterpillar looks phoney as hell. It’s not helped by the decision to run generic audio over the top. (In the absence of “caterpillar gut” they chose “boiling saucepan” from the catalogue.)
Apologies for the cynicism. Can I make up for it by pointing you here? All the creepy pleasures of body invasion and mind control – without the uncomfortable suspicion that it’s been intercut with handpuppets.
mds 05.19.09 at 4:41 pm
Have you scrutinized the rest of the theology embraced by the noisiest creationists? You answered your own question above.
arthur 05.19.09 at 5:23 pm
Pixar is going to option this any minute now…
Colin Danby 05.19.09 at 7:11 pm
Thanks for the clip Bert! Got any favorite caterpillar gut audio?
Ben Alpers 05.19.09 at 7:26 pm
So nat’ralists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller fleas that bite ’em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
–Jonathan Swift
bert 05.19.09 at 8:41 pm
No favourite, Colin. It’s a very niche field.
You get your caterpillar gut audio by digging around in the long tail, I think.
Whatever you can get, you’re thankful for.
bert 05.19.09 at 10:13 pm
Actually the thought strikes me – the audio they’ve gone for is “scuba equipment”.
If that’s a conscious decision, it’s contemptuous of the audience.
If it’s not, its amusingly witless.
Similar points are being made on PZ’s thread, I notice.
I don’t mean to be lemon-sucking. The underlying science is fascinating, after all.
But this approach to film-making isn’t so far away from that famous Disney film with the lemmings.
Evil Bender 05.19.09 at 10:37 pm
At the risk of being trite, I must say the personal aspect of the story in the post resonated with the English major in me, perhaps because it reminded me a bit of Seamus Heaney’s poem “Death of a Naturalist.”
Cannoneo 05.20.09 at 12:01 am
Stephen Jay Gould wrote about the role of the parasitic wasp as a test case in science writing for two centuries, first for the theological problem of cruelty in nature, and then for the linguistic problem of writing about nature with a language that has moral drama built into it.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_nonmoral.html
“As I read through the nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature on ichneumons, nothing amused me more than the tension between an intellectual knowledge that wasps should not be described in human terms and a literary or emotional inability to avoid the familiar categories of epic and narrative, pain and destruction, victim and vanquisher.”
Keith M Ellis 05.20.09 at 2:20 am
Quite reminiscent of the relationship between white middle-class voters and the GOP.
Keith M Ellis 05.20.09 at 2:25 am
“The best thing about this is that the wasps/larvae have a co-evolved mind-control virus.”
That’s pretty common in parasitology, I understand. There are, in fact, numerous examples with humans as hosts. I quite clearly recall my profound astonishment when a friend, a biology major, described to me his studies in parasitology with regard to parasites’ abilities to affect the behavior of mammals, including humans.
Shawn Crowley 05.20.09 at 3:37 am
Anyone interested in parasite modification of host behavior should take a look at Janice Moore’s 2002 book on the topic. Janice is at Colorado State University and has been working on host-parasite relations for the past 30 years. She’s also a very nice person. Buy her book.
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LifeSciences/Ecology/AnimalBehavior/?view=usa&ci=9780195146530
Matt Heath 05.20.09 at 11:04 am
Keith M Ellis @16: I’m not biologist so I’m prepared to be put right but as I understand it (from the discussion at P.Z. place) other parasites alter behaviour with chemicals they release themselves. Outsourcing it to a symbiotic virus is apparently something quite special done by a few types of wasps.
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