We love parasitic insect stories and this one is a doozy—a beautiful, yet evil creature, the emerald cockroach or jewel wasp, that paralyzes and then zombifies cockroaches. The female wasp behaves this way to lay one solitary egg on the cockroach. When the egg hatches, the larva emerges and eventually eats its way into the belly of the roach. There, the larva will make a cocoon and grow into a beautiful new wasp. This part is all old news—and for more gory details, see Carl Zimmer’s post on National Geographic, complete with video!

But here’s the new part: before the larva makes its cocoon, it completely sterilizes the inside of the not-surprisingly filthy cockroach!

Cockroaches carry bacteria and other disease-carrying microbes around in their bellies—very unhealthy for growing wasp larvae. German researchers found that the larvae secrete “several types of antibiotics, specifically the chemicals mellein and micromolide,” according to LiveScience, that kill even the nastiest of microbes.

The research, published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds these secretions promising for developing future human antibiotics.

If you’re a fish, how do you climb a waterfall? Well, if you’re a Nopili goby, the same way you eat, with your mouth, according to new research in PLoS ONE. The fish is known to inch its way up waterfalls as tall as 100 meters by using a combination of two suckers; one of these is an oral sucker also used for feeding on algae.

The researchers filmed jaw muscle movement in these fish while climbing and eating, and found that the overall movements were similar during both activities. (A video of the climbing can be found at Discover.) The researchers note that it is difficult to determine whether feeding movements were adapted for climbing, or vice versa, but the similarities are consistent with the idea that these fish have learned to use the same muscles to meet two very different needs of their unique lifestyle.

ScienceShot describes this as “exaptation—when a structure that was meant for one function is co-opted for another.”

Finally, ever since I saw the headline, “Birds May Get Emotional Over Birdsong,” it made me think of this line from High Fidelity (the movie, but likely the Nick Hornby book, too), “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”

Well, it turns out that birds don’t get that emotional over their kin’s tweets, but researchers at Emory University found that white-throated sparrows experience some of the same emotions as a human listening to music. The recent study, published in the Frontiers of Evolutionary Neuroscience, demonstrates that taste is everything for these songs.

“We found that the same neural reward system is activated in female birds in the breeding state that are listening to male birdsong, and in people listening to music that they like,” says Sarah Earp, lead author of the study. Turns out another male hearing that same male birdsong likens it to music from scary scenes of a horror movie.

For more about this bird-brained study and its origins, check out this press release.

(Title thanks to the 1980s TV show)

Image: Sharadpunita/Wikipedia

The tree resin that forms amber acts like an amazing time machine. It freezes items—plants, insects and other life forms—in near perfection, later turning into a semi-precious stone for scientists to study millions of years later.

The latest amber find, from Myanmar, is the only fossil ever discovered of a spider attacking prey caught in its web. The research is published this week in Historical Biology.

“This juvenile spider was going to make a meal out of a tiny parasitic wasp, but never quite got to it,” says lead author George Poinar, Jr. of Oregon State University. “This was the wasp’s worst nightmare, and it never ended. The wasp was watching the spider just as it was about to be attacked, when tree resin flowed over and captured both of them.”

Both the spider and wasp species are currently extinct, but provide clues to earlier life. This type of wasp, Poinar says, belongs to a group that is known today to parasitize spiders and insect eggs. In that context, the attack by the spider, an orb-weaver, might be considered payback.

Somewhat surprisingly, the piece of amber also contains the body of a male spider in the same web. This provides the oldest evidence of social behavior in spiders, which still exists in some species but rarely. Most spiders have solitary, often cannibalistic lives, and males will not hesitate to attack immature species in the same web.

Perhaps Howitt said it best in her poem (changed a bit here):

And take a lesson from this tale, of the Spider and the Wasp!

Image: Oregon State University

Domesticated honey bees have been disappearing for the last several years due to Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. This past fall, researchers found that CCD is potentially caused by a deadly one-two punch from a virus-fungus combination.

In a recent study, published in PLoS One, researchers found that bee pollen pellets can contain the contributing viruses.

The scientists found that even if a bee were not infected with a virus, their pollen pellets could contain viruses, indicating that pollen itself may harbor the deadly agents. When infected pollen is stored in a hive, researchers found the queen could become infected and lay infected eggs, creating an entirely new generation carrying the virus.

Sadly, virus-laden pollen affects more than just honey bees. The researchers found eleven wild species carrying infected pollen pellets, as well. The authors suggest that the pollen is potentially responsible for transmitting the disease from the domestic to wild populations. Perhaps this could be the reason that wild pollinators, such as bumble bees and wasps, have also been in recent decline.

Both natural ecosystems and agriculture depend on pollinators—natives and honey bees. Their health (or lack there of) is essential to all of us. The more we know, the better prepared we are to protect them.

Image by Eli Shany/Wikimedia

Now scientists have discovered an insect that might also convert the sun’s energy for fuel. Publishing in the journal Naturwissenschaften, the researchers describe the process by which the Oriental hornet uses its exoskeleton to absorb sunlight.

Since the 1990s, scientists noticed that these insects were different. They are most active during the hottest, brightest part of the day, unlike most wasps. Around that time, scientists also discovered that the Oriental hornet could actually produce voltage along its exoskeleton.

According to the PLoS Blog The Gleaming Retort, in 2009, the same scientists:

…showed that, unexpectedly, a variety of important metabolic activities seem to center on the yellow abdominal stripes of the Oriental hornets rather than around the fat bodies that normally handle them in insects. (Think about what this means: if the same arrangement applied to humans, our skin would be doing the job of our livers.)

Remember, beauty is not always only skin deep. The current research dug deeper into the exoskeleton. Looking at the brown and yellow areas of the hornet, the scientists went all the way down to the nano-level of its exoskeleton. They found that the yellow area would scatter the light, not reflect it, allowing it to penetrate into the deep layers of the exoskeleton. Essentially, the yellow areas were trapping the sunlight.

With the trapped sunlight, the yellow pigment, Xanthopterin, then works to use it. According to lead author Marian Plotkin, in BBC News:

“Xanthopterin works as a light harvesting molecule transforming light into electrical energy.”

So do these Oriental hornets use photsynthesis to power their movements? According to Discover’s Discoblog, there’s not yet enough evidence

… but they’re working on it.

Image by MattiPaavola/Wikimedia Commons