It’s been a month since I’ve joined Corante, and my deep thanks go out to the many new readers who have visited the Loom. Daily visits reached a new high this Friday, January 9, with 900 pairs of eyeballs pointed this way. Please be sure to enter your email address in the subscription box in the lefthand column so that I can notify you of new posts.
Few humans have been as successful in Hollywood as parasitoids. Parasitoids are a particularly gruesome kind of parasite that invariably kills its host by the time it becomes an adult and is ready to leave the host’s body. A parasitoid female wasp, to give one example, will fly along until it finds a caterpillar of some particular species. It lands on top of the caterpillar, jabs an egg-laying stinger into the caterpillar’s body, and injects some eggs. The eggs hatch, the wasp larvae feed on the living caterpillar from within, and then, when they’re ready to metamorphose into adults, they crawl out of their hapless host, leaving it to die.