Ze Frank: True facts about parasitoid wasps

November 6, 2024 • 12:15 pm

Matthew sent in this latest “True Facts” video from Ze Frank; it’s about some of the most amazing and nefarious insects around: parasitoid wasps. (There’s an ad in the middle.)

There are a lot of questions and “I don’t know” answers here. The gall wasps are especially fascinating from an evolutionary viewpoint, as they somehow modify a plant’s gene expression to make the plant grow a gall that can house the wasp.

We don’t know how they do this, but even the gall wasps inside their houses can themselves be parasitized by other species of gall wasps (Again, we don’t know how these “hyperparasitoids” detect and find a larval host inside a gall). Finally, we don’t understand how natural selection has modified a parasitoid wasp so that it injects stuff into its host that modifies the host’s behavior, making iot a “zombie host.”

The photography is amazing; it seems to get better with every one of ZeFrank’s videos.

Do watch this; you’ll learn some natural history and, I hope, be amazed at the achievements of natural selection.

8 thoughts on “Ze Frank: True facts about parasitoid wasps”

  3. Wow, fascinating to see these things alive in such detail and such crazy behaviors! I see in the credits that some of these were filmed by the late Andreas Kay, who rediscovered Atelopus coynei!

  4. I of course don’t know how a chemical can alter a host’s behavior, or cause plants to grow a gall. Perhaps these are caused by elaborate and complicated interactions. But I wonder if gall-inducing chemicals could be something relatively simple. Something that mainly stimulates growth or triggers a wound response.

  5. From what I know, there is a cocktail of chemicals, some of which are known, but they dont know which ones are important, or how they work. Remember, the galls can be quite elaborate, and each wasp makes a different kind of gall!

  6. I assume you’ve also seen his Sad Cat Diaries video? That one is hilarious and quite accurate.

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