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I Walked With a Zombie (insect)
Walking with zombies: fact or fiction?
Actually, it's both.
Many species of wasps feed their babies meat. The wasp, a single mother, provides for her brood by scavenging from dead animals, hunting and killing insects and spiders, and crashing your picnic and stealing bits of your hamburger. But she obviously can’t carry a whole hamburger or deceased chipmunk back to the nest. Could you bring home a whole cow on the bus or on foot? And, even if you could borrow a truck, what would you do with the darn thing once you got there?
Wasps don’t have big freezers. They don't even have refrigerators. If the wasp's killed an insect or a spider, she can carry the whole thing home in one go, but her growing children need a lot of fresh meat and it's still not going to keep long enough. That makes for a lot of tedious and exhausting shopping expeditions. So, some wasps have found a way to make a single trip's worth of food last longer. It isn’t pretty.
The wasp finds a nice prey item – a nice plump caterpillar, maybe...
...or a spider.
She then paralyzes it with a sting and schleps it back to the nest.
It’s a heavy load, but the wasp only has to carry it once. Then she lays her eggs on the paralyzed animal. The adult wasp soon dies, but her prey doesn’t. It lies quietly in the nest, staying nice and fresh, while the larvae hatch out and feed on it. It takes a few weeks for them to finish their meal.
This wasp is making her nest by digging a burrow in the sand.
After she’s laid her egg and dragged the paralyzed spider inside, she’ll fill up the entrance with dirt and go about her business.
The emerald cockroach wasp, or jewel wasp, has, however, gone a bit further. She doesn’t paralyze her prey. Instead, she injects its head with a neurotoxin.
The now-docile cockroach stands quietly while the wasp bites off one (or both) of its antennae and takes hold of one of the stumps.
The wasp then leads the cockroach, which walks along obediently like a dog on a leash, back to the nest, where she lays a single egg on it.
The cockroach is still standing in the nest, unable to flee, when the wasp seals it up.
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I like your post,but I have a fear of these insects.haha
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