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New wasp turns social spiders into zombies


Still Waters

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It sounds like the plot of the world's tiniest horror movie: deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a newly discovered species of wasp transforms a "social" spider into a zombie-like drone that abandons its colony to do the wasp's bidding.

That's the gruesome, real-life discovery by University of British Columbia researchers, who detail the first example of a manipulative relationship between a new Zatypota species wasp and a social Anelosimus eximius spider in a study published recently in Ecological Entomology.

"Wasps manipulating the behaviour of spiders has been observed before, but not at a level as complex as this," said Philippe Fernandez-Fournier, lead author of the study and former master's student at UBC's department of zoology. "Not only is this wasp targeting a social species of spider but it's making it leave its colony, which it rarely does."

https://phys.org/news/2018-11-newly-wasp-social-spiders-zombies.html

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Seems like everything is having a go at making zombies out of the poor bees ... bees makes great zombie slaves ...
 

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Mar 1, 2012 - “The next time I looked at the vial, there were all these fly pupae surrounding the bees,” he said. A fly (Apocephalus borealis) had inserted its ...

 

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Jan 4, 2012 - They're alive but not alive—bee zombies. And the parasites that cause the transformation may provide a clue to the mysterious colony collapse ...

 

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Sep 25, 2012 - It has been confirmed an amateur beekeeper in Washington state has found "zombie bees" on his property. This is the first time "zombees" ...

 

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I wonder sometimes if there is some germ that has already caused a parasitic infection and has already made zombies out the entire Human Population

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Wasps are terrifying.  I watched a documentary about one wasp that uses ants to raise it's larvae and give them preferential treatment over the ants own.  The relationship was so intricate and unlikely that I nearly became a creationist. ;)

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18 hours ago, third_eye said:

Seems like everything is having a go at making zombies out of the poor bees ... bees makes great zombie slaves ...
 

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I wonder sometimes if there is some germ that has already caused a parasitic infection and has already made zombies out the entire Human Population

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Yes, Its called money.

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