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Science News

Wasp Larvae Feed on Zombie Roaches 435

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the make-them-200-feet-tall-and-you-have-a-movie dept.
TheUploader writes "The story leaves nothing to embellish: The wasp, Ampulex compressa, has evolved to inject a toxin into a specific part of a roach's brain, turning it into a zombie. The wasp then leads the zombie roach into the wasp's nest, lays eggs inside it, and waits for its young to hatch, who will then go on to do the same to more roaches."
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Wasp Larvae Feed on Zombie Roaches More

Wasp Larvae Feed on Zombie Roaches

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  • More proof.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:23PM (#14642129)
    of God's Intelligent Design on Earth
    • Sir, you deserve +5 funny for that remark.

      Thanks for starting my day with a laugh.

    • Re:More proof.. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Decaff ( 42676 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:49PM (#14642278)
      of God's Intelligent Design on Earth

      Parasitism was one of the reasons that Charles Darwin lost his faith in later years. How could a loving God create so much suffering?

      • Re:More proof.. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Creosote ( 33182 ) * on Saturday February 04, 2006 @02:12PM (#14642392) Homepage
        Mark Twain also saw wasp parasitism in particular as an argument against benevolent design. See, for example, his late sketch "Little Bessie" [positiveatheism.org].
      • Parasitism was one of the reasons that Charles Darwin lost his faith in later years. How could a loving God create so much suffering?

        Well, obviously the cockroach was a sinner. It doesn't happen to cockroaches who are good and don't commit sins.

        Repend! Repend! Or W.A.S.P.s will lay eggs in your brain.

      • Re:More proof.. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Chrononium ( 925164 )
        When the United States sent over all of those troops (i.e. fathers and sons) to Europe and the Pacific to combat an enemy threatening all of humanity, was there a lot of suffering at home? Yes. Did many of those boys die pointless deaths in Normandy and beyond? Yes. Was the suffering bad? Yes. Was the suffering senseless? NO.

        Do not presume that if humans do not know the reason behind the suffering that there is no reason. That suffering is somehow always evil and to be avoided.

        Attach the butterfly effect to
    • I'm all for comedy on Slashdot, but these evolution "debates" make us all look stupid.

    • not the roach or wasp as you know them (Score:5, Interesting)

      by nietsch ( 112711 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:54PM (#14642310) Homepage Journal
      the roach genus is quite prolific and well distributed with only 2 or 3 considered pests. The same goes for wasps, and only a few specieses of the genus are considered pests. A whole lot more wasp species are grown as biological crop protection: the locate the caterpillar, lay an egg in it and watch while the new wasp eats its way out of the still living caterpillar. Nothing new here, except that this particular species has found a way to use the roaches power to move the body to a premade burrow instead of digging the burrow on the spot.
      Unless Slashdot has a very high percentage of entymologists, I don't think it is that newsworthy for slashdot readers. BTW the submitter was flogging his own book it seems?
      • I thought at least the headline was pretty funny and interesting. Curious about the article now.

      • Re:not the roach or wasp as you know them (Score:5, Insightful)

        by nwbvt ( 768631 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @03:39PM (#14642767)
        "Nothing new here, except that this particular species has found a way to use the roaches power to move the body to a premade burrow instead of digging the burrow on the spot."

        Yeah, hence why the headline read "Wasp Larvae Feed on Zombie Roaches" instead of simply "Wasp Larvae Feed on Roaches". This particular mechanism is the interesting aspect of this article.

        "Unless Slashdot has a very high percentage of entymologists, I don't think it is that newsworthy for slashdot readers."

        We may not have a large percentage of entymologists here, but it does have a large percentage of science nerds who enjoy reading about novel discoveries in the world of science (of course until the site recovers from being /.ed, its hard to determine whether or not this is indeed a novel discovery or just a reprint of something that was discovered some time ago).

      • What nwbvt said. Obviously the headline is appropriate, and to me it is newsworthy if only because of the perceived cruelty in the attack.

        It's also undeniably amazing that they get to control roaches like that. For me that is the most interesting part, not the goal they have but the means they're able to perform.

    • Re:More proof.. (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Absolutely! You, sir, have proved that if this was intelligently designed, then the designer was one sick fucker.

    • Re:More proof.. (Score:5, Funny)

      by no_pets ( 881013 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @02:51PM (#14642585)
      Too bad He didn't help intelligently design their web server. It's /.ed already.
    • Christianity says that all the earth is fallen because of man's sin. Why that would affect wasps isn't clear, but certainly it is not inconsistent with the Christian world view.

  • Now... (Score:2, Funny)

    by dmitrygr ( 736758 )
    Now how do we get one into Bush/Gates/[insert your favorite villain here]?

  • No need to rent Kingdom of the Spiders! (Score:5, Funny)

    by kalpol ( 714519 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:26PM (#14642138)
    I have fuel for my nightmares now for several more years, thanks!

  • MMM! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rob_squared ( 821479 ) <rob@rob-squared . c om> on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:27PM (#14642142)
    What wonderful breakfast conversation.

    Anyway, I think I detect an IgNobile prize winner here.

  • Real-Live Goa'uld (Score:3, Funny)

    by kyle90 ( 827345 ) <kyle90@gmail.com> on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:27PM (#14642143) Homepage Journal
    Just think about it... we'd better eradicate this species before they become a threat to our planet.

  • sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)

    by Paladin144 ( 676391 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:28PM (#14642153) Homepage
    The wasp, Ampulex compressa, has evolved to inject a toxin into a specific part of a roach's brain, turning it into a zombie.

    Man, I think I've been on a date with that WASP. I woke up the next morning with no money, a splitting headache and size seven poopshoot.

  • Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MustardMan ( 52102 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:28PM (#14642155)
    Somewhere there's a Romero zombie rolling over in its grave. Then crawling out. And eating someone's brains.

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)

      by LouisZepher ( 643097 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:39PM (#14642219)
      Incidentally, today is Romero's birthday...

      • Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Informative)

        by PCM2 ( 4486 )
        Well, and if we want to get pedantic, Romero zombies never ate anybody's brains. They mostly went for the guts. It was "Return of the Living Dead," the comedy/horror take-off on the Romero films, that brought in all the brain-eating.

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Informative)

      by MukiMuki ( 692124 )
      Just for clarification, Romero never made brain eating zombies. His particular breed just ate people alive. (best part of a zombie movie, really, is when they decide to rip someone to pieces. See : Shaun of the Dead, or any of Romero's films)

      The brain-eating cliché came from Return of the Living Dead, which had nothing to do with Romero's movie, save for a producer involved, I believe.

      To be quite honest, I thought this wasp had stronger horror movie ties to the Alien series, and was probably even a dir

  • I just moved to New York City (Score:5, Funny)

    by SetupWeasel ( 54062 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:29PM (#14642156) Homepage
    so I'd like to say...

    SUCK IT YOU FUCKING ROACHES!

    I feel better now.

  • Welcome (Score:5, Funny)

    by mlawmlaw ( 250413 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:29PM (#14642160)
    Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just lost the picture, but what we've seen speaks for itself. The Roaches have apparently been taken over -- 'conquered' if you will -- by a master race of giant space wasps. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the wasps will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground honey caves.

  • ... I knew a girl (Score:3, Funny)

    by JMZorko ( 150414 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:30PM (#14642161) Homepage

    ... who did the same sort of thing -- well, sorta :-)

    Regards

    John

  • Use This Mirror (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:30PM (#14642171)
    http://loom.corante.com.nyud.net:8090/archives/200 6/02/02/the_wisdom_of_parasites.php [nyud.net]

  • Not really new... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by massivefoot ( 922746 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:30PM (#14642172)
    Well the site appears to have been well and truly Slashdotted already. However, zombifying a creature for your own benefit isn't anything new.

    I seem to recall there exists a paracite who's lifecycle consists of:
    Be born in sheep shit.
    Get eaten by an ant.
    Zombify ant to cause it to climb grass, where it will be eaten by a sheep.
    Reproduce inside digestive system of sheep.

    If anyone who actually payed attention in biology classes cares to elaborate, please do!

    • Re:Not really new... (Score:5, Informative)

      by NorbrookC ( 674063 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @02:12PM (#14642388) Journal

      You're thinking of Dicrocoelium dendriticum, the sheep liver fluke. The eggs get passed out in the feces, and are eaten by a snail. The snail sheds a second-stage larvae, which is eaten by an ant. The parasite causes the ant to become negatively geotropic - it climbs up onto the grass - and is eaten by the sheep, where it grows into an adult and starts the whole process over.

    • You forgot:

      ...Profit!!

    • Re:Not really new... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bcmm ( 768152 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @03:10PM (#14642657)
      There are many parasites/diseases which cause interesting self-destructive tendencies in the host which take the parasite to the next stage in it's life-cycle.

      Rabies causes extreme aggression in most mammals, causing them to infect another host by biting. There is a parasitic worm which causes grasshoppers to jump into water, where the worm's larvae have to live.

      This is exceptional because the wasp's stinger is actually inserted into a precise area of the brain of the victim, and because the wasp can actually steer the victim by stimulating it's antennae (I believe the same system has been tested on cockroaches by humans; they move away from the stimulated side by a protective reflex). Your ant parasite almost certainly doesn't have a sufficiently advance neural system to actually guide the ant upwards, rather it probably induces this behaviour by chemically triggering some signal the ant would use for more useful behaviour, the same way rabies causes dogs to pass on saliva by becoming aggressive.

  • The world is a scary place... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:31PM (#14642178) Homepage Journal
    I spent a summer in Ecuador in a field study class. We learned about one fungus that makes its living this way: Spores enter the body of an insect where they mature into the adult fungus. This adult fungus affects the mind of the bug so that it climbs to the tippy-top of whatever tree it's on. Then, when it's at the top it just sits there while the fungus consumes its innards. Finally, when the fungus is done growing, the body of the bug breaks open, and millions of spores go floating about on the wind.

  • Sucks they're so efficient..... (Score:3, Funny)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:32PM (#14642182) Journal
    If they'd just go around stinging the roaches, rather than being efficient enough to lead just one back to the nest to raise more of them for food, you might be able to get rid of roach problems with these wasps. Evacuate a building for a while and drop some of these wasps in there. After a certain length of time, fumigate it to kill the wasps - and voila, no more bug problem!

  • *Puts on karma-protection suit and helmet*
    *Turns on microphone - tweeeeeeet -*

    *ahem ahem*

    Ready?

    Braaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiinnnsssssssss....

    *Ducks* :P
  • It seems that it would be more efficient to guide the roach into its nest, where there are presumably more roaches, than to take the roach away.

    That might be dangerous, though.

  • Slashdotted. Here is article text. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Exsam ( 768226 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:39PM (#14642218)
    Its some nifty-weird stuff.

    I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty much collected the whole set. But until now I had somehow missed the gruesome glory that is a wasp named Ampulex compressa. As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg's host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach's mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head. The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears. From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash. The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes. The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon--which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative. I find this wasp fascinating for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it represents an evolutionary transition. Over and over again, free-living organisms have become parasites, adapting to hosts with exquisite precision. If you consider a full-blown parasite, it can be hard to conceive of how it could have evolved from anything else. Ampulex offers some clues, because it exists in between the free-living and parasitic worlds. Amuplex is not technically a parasite, but something known as an exoparasitoid. In other words, a free-living adult lays an egg outside a host, and then the larva crawls into the host. One could easily imagine the ancestors of Ampulex as wasps that laid their eggs near dead insects--as some species do today. These corpse-feeding ancestors then evolved into wasps that attacked living hosts. Likewise, it's not hard to envision an Ampulex-like wasp evolving into full-blown parasitoids that inject their eggs directly into their hosts, as many species do today. And then there's the sting. Ampulex does not want to kill cockroaches. It doesn't even want to paralyze them the way spiders and snakes do, since it is too small to drag a big paralyzed roach into its burrow. So instead it just delicately retools the roach's neural network to take away its motivation. Its venom does more than make roaches zombies. It also alters their metabolism, so that their intake of oxygen drops by a third. The Israeli researchers found that they could also drop oxygen consumption in cockroaches by injecting paralyzing drugs or by removing the neurons that the wasps disable with their sting. But they can manage only a crude imitation; the manipulated cockroaches quickly dehydrated and were dead within six days. The

  • Lunch (Score:2, Funny)

    by dg41 ( 743918 )
    Funny, I wasn't planning on keeping my lunch down anyways. (too much info)

  • Awsome! (Score:3, Funny)

    by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:40PM (#14642230) Homepage
    Now, I need to steal some genes from this little wasp, inject them into prostitutes. Then, take over the minds of a few select politicians. Next thing you know, I've got one in the whitehouse...and..uh...

    Wait a second...

  • Did you ever feel like a zombie roach? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) * on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:43PM (#14642243) Homepage Journal
    When filling out your tax returns?

  • TEXT BODY (Score:5, Informative)

    by tj500 ( 595962 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:48PM (#14642270)
    THE LOOM

    February 02, 2006 The Wisdom of Parasites

    Posted by Carl Zimmer

    I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty much collected the whole set. But until now I had somehow missed the gruesome glory that is a wasp named Ampulex compressa.

    As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg's host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach's mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.

    The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

    From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash.

    The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.

    The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon--which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.

    I find this wasp fascinating for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it represents an evolutionary transition. Over and over again, free-living organisms have become parasites, adapting to hosts with exquisite precision. If you consider a full-blown parasite, it can be hard to conceive of how it could have evolved from anything else. Ampulex offers some clues, because it exists in between the free-living and parasitic worlds.

    Amuplex is not technically a parasite, but something known as an exoparasitoid. In other words, a free-living adult lays an egg outside a host, and then the larva crawls into the host. One could easily imagine the ancestors of Ampulex as wasps that laid their eggs near dead insects--as some species do today. These corpse-feeding ancestors then evolved into wasps that attacked living hosts. Likewise, it's not hard to envision an Ampulex-like wasp evolving into full-blown parasitoids that inject their eggs directly into their hosts, as many species do today.

    And then there's the sting. Ampulex does not want to kill cockroaches. It doesn't even want to paralyze them the way spiders and snakes do, since it is too small to drag a big paralyzed roach into its burrow. So instead it just delicately retools the roach's neural network to take away its motivation. Its venom does more than make roaches zombies. It also alters their metabolism, so that their intake of oxygen drops by a third. The Israeli researchers found that they could also drop oxygen consumption in cockroaches by injecting paralyzing drugs or by removing the neurons that the wasps disable with the

  • Other parasites with similar capabilities (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sique ( 173459 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:52PM (#14642294) Homepage
    There is a group of crabs called Sacculinae [wikipedia.org], which do the same to the crabs they are parasiting on.

    The sacculina is a barnacle which grows on (or rather below) other crabs, squeezing and growing its so called rhizocephalae into the body of the host crab and trying to reach the brain of the crab. After the brain is reached, the host crab turns into a zombie, reacting on each command from the sacculina, even searching for a mate for the sacculina.

  • Parallels... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Transcendent ( 204992 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @01:53PM (#14642303)
    ...isn't that what lobbyists do?

  • More zombie madness (Score:5, Interesting)

    by burnin1965 ( 535071 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @02:00PM (#14642329) Homepage
    Leucochloridium paradoxum is a worm which infects snails and turns them into zombies as well. The zombie snail crawls up vegitation where it can be seen by birds and the parasite causes the snails eye stalks to extend and pulsate to atract birds.

    The birds then eat the eye stalks and become infected themselves. The worms lay eggs in the bird's digestive system and they are then spread by the birds excrement which the snails eat thus repeating the cycle of life for the parasite.

    Rather creepy stuff.

    http://people.smu.edu/eheise/Leucochloridium_parad oxum.htm [smu.edu]

    burnin
  • Brittany Spears, Ashlee Simpson, Mariah Carey and J-Lo pretty much prove this exists in the dominate species as well.

  • Best parasitic wasp story yet... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Archtech ( 159117 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @02:15PM (#14642403)
    This is the most sophisticated parasitic routine I have ever heard of, AFAICR. But I was reminded of David Attenborough's BBC TV series "Life in the Undergrowth", which I recently watched - it's available on DVD in the UK, and according to Amazon will be released in the USA at the beginning of May. That contains a few similar examples, including a small wasp whose grub parasitizes living spiders - the biter bit. Strongly recommended, like everything by "Whispering Dave".

    Until he explained it, I did not know that wasps were among the oldest of insects, and that both ants and bees were descended from primitive wasps. That set me thinking about cockroaches, which also go back to the dawn of land life. I wondered whether they were, unlike most other bugs, immune to attack by wasps. I guess this article answers that question pretty decisively.

    Ever wonder how you would cope with wasps the size of a human being? I know it should be physically impossible, but it's too good a scary idea to give up. "The Furies", by Keith Roberts, is a very good SF novel on that theme, which - unlike many such books - hasn't dated since the 1960s. To quote a review on amazon.co.uk, the Furies are "wasps with a 2 meter wingspan and mandibles like bolt-cutters". And, of course, they hunt in packs...
  • I for one welcome our new Voodoo Wasp overlords.
  • that reminded me of an article by Sapolsky in the Scientific American of March 2003 called "bugs in the brain". a pdf version is here [nau.edu]. which then led me to read "a primates memoire". haven't looked at other animals/organisms the same since.

  • Original paper here (Score:2, Informative)

    by philgross ( 23409 )
    The original paper can be found here [bgu.ac.il]. It actually dates from 2003. Despite my weak biology background, I found it very readable.

    They also describe an interesting middle phase of the wasp attack which was not mentioned in the summary: after the brain injection, the roach furiously "grooms" itself for 30 minutes. They also note that the zombie behavior takes about 30 mins to take hold. Thus there's a possibility that the intense "itch" in the cockroach keeps it in the same place until its escape reflex ha
  • WASP Larvae Feed on Zombie Roaches

    ENOUGH with the ethnic slurs already!

  • If only... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dogun ( 7502 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @02:33PM (#14642500) Homepage
    Now, if only I could do that to women, I might actually stand a chance of reproducing.

  • hmm... (Score:5, Funny)

    by aeoo ( 568706 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @02:43PM (#14642552) Journal
    And then there's the sting. Ampulex does not want to kill cockroaches. It doesn't even want to paralyze them the way spiders and snakes do, since it is too small to drag a big paralyzed roach into its burrow. So instead it just delicately retools the roach's neural network to take away its motivation. Its venom does more than make roaches zombies. It also alters their metabolism, so that their intake of oxygen drops by a third.

    This reminds me of a social dynamic between human employees and employers:

    1. Employer doesn't want to kill the employee: check.
    2. Employer doesn't want to paralize the employee: check.
    3. Employer delicately takes away employee's self-motivation: check.

    I bet the stuff about oxygen and metabolism is true as well.

  • Toxoplasmosis (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bombula ( 670389 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @03:48PM (#14642803)
    Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite whose life cycle seems to revolve mostly around cats, but it has the ability to affect other mammals as well, including otters and humans, according to the current wikipedia entry. I remembered reading a while back that this parasite alters human behavior by creating tiny cysts in brain tissue. Well, anyway, here's the behavior-altering section from wikipedia:

    "Toxoplasma is one of a number of parasites which require alteration of host's behaviour for their life cycle[1]. The changes observed are likely due to the presence of cysts in the brain, which produce or induce production of a neurotransmitter, possibly dopamine[2], therefore acting similarly to dopamine reuptake inhibitor type antidepressants. A slightly increased car accident rate, and reaction time slowed by a few percent have been observed (specifically, the infected lose concentration more quickly than the controls in the second and third minute)[3]. "If our data are true then about a million people a year die just because they are infected with toxoplasma," the researcher Jaroslav Flegr told The Guardian[4]. The data shows that the risk decreases with time after infection, however all older drivers are generally able to compensate for longer reaction time[5]. Ruth Gilbert, medical coordinator of the European Multicentre Study on Congenital Toxoplasmosis, told BBC News Online these findings could be due to chance, or due to social and cultural factors associated with toxoplasma infection[6]. Studies argue about the influence of the parasite on personality. There are claims of toxoplasma causing antisocial attitude in men and promiscuity[7] (or even signs of higher intelligence[8]) in women, and greater susceptibility to schizophrenia and manic depression[9] in all infected persons. A review of research focused on the schizophrenia connection confirms an association but does not confirm a causal relationship [10]."

    Maybe women like cats because their toxoplasmosis infections make them smarter! Or maybe it's just because women can identify with creatures that are obsessed with their appearance, are impossible to understand, predict, or order around, and look down their nose in scorn at all of the huffing and panting and howling and slobbering we direct at them...

  • Sounds like human behavior at the singles bar.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by d474 ( 695126 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @04:51PM (#14643038)
    Wasp (guy) injects neurotoxins (buys cocktails) into cockroach's brain (for a hot chick) turning it (her) into a zombie (an easy hot chick) and then leads it (her) back to it's nest (bachelor pad), lays eggs inside it (screws her without a rubber), and waits for eggs to hatch (shotgun wedding!).

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