A caterpillar’s life is not an easy one. The plants that it eats make toxins to make it sick. Birds swoop in to pluck it away and feed it to their chicks. But the most horrific threat comes from wasps that use caterpillars as hosts for their young. These parasitoid wasps are among my favorite creatures (see my post on the emerald cockroach wasp, which attacks cockroaches like a neurosurgeon). So it was with eye-popping delight that I read a new paper in PLOS Biology One about how another species of wasp in Brazil attacks another caterpillar. Glyptapanteles glyptapanteles is more than just cruel to its host. It also gives its host an extreme case of Stockholm syndrome.
Author: Lori Jia
Just a technical note–for some reason my site carlzimmer.com has been put on some bad list by Google, so that you are warned that if you go to the site your computer will melt into a pool of liquid germanium. But it’s safe.
Originally published June 3, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
The microbial march continues! I’ll be in Seattle today, giving two talks on Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. The first is a 1:30 talk at Microsoft Research. Then I’ll be giving a public talk at Town Hall at 7:30 as part of their science series.
Originally published June 3, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
One of the most important experiments in evolution is going on right now in a laboratory in Michigan State University. A dozen flasks full of E. coli are sloshing around on a gently rocking table. The bacteria in those flasks has been evolving since 1988–for over 44,000 generations. And because they’ve been so carefully observed all that time, they’ve revealed some important lessons about how evolution works.
The experiment was launched by MSU biologist Richard Lenski. I wrote about Lenski’s work last year in the New York Times, and in more detail my new book Microcosm.
The French biologist Jacques Monod once famously said, “What is true for E. coli is true for the elephant.” At the time, he was referring to the universal rules of molecular biology–of DNA and proteins, for example, that are the same from one species to another. As scientists in the mid-1900s figured out the workings of E. coli, they were also figuring out the workings of life in general. In my new book Microcosm, I make the case that Monod’s words were more true than even he realized. In the Boston Globe today, I explain how scientists used to think that there was one big difference between E. coli and the elephant (and us)–we get old and E. coli doesn’t.
Continue reading “Microcosm in the Boston Globe: You Get Old, I Get Old, E. coli Gets Old”