I’m back at last from the west coast leg of the Microcosm tour.
Portland had a cloudy, melancholy charm, and at Powell’s I gave a reading in front of a collection of hand-made black velvet paintings from the nearby Velveteria. When the audience’s eyes drifted off of me, I couldn’t tell if they were lost in thought or distracted by Jimi Hendrix or a smoking clown.
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.
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.