The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar

by Matt Simon

  THE LAMPREY-LOVING HENRY AND THE LAMPREY-LOVING HENRY WHO CAME BEFORE HIM

  The lamprey’s mouth, not to mention its habits, hasn’t seemed to bother European nobility in the slightest. King Henry I, visiting Normandy in 1135, is rumored to have eaten so many lampreys at a feast that he up and died. Henry V, apparently unconcerned about the fate of the Lamprey-Loving Henry That Came Before Him, also demanded lamprey while visiting Normandy.

  Even in 2012 for Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee, the city of Gloucester presented a traditional regal lamprey pie. Only those weren’t British lampreys, for the fish are scarce over there in these modern times. But not here in the States. So a representative of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission flew across the pond and presented Gloucester with sacrificial American lampreys. Thus did the queen get her pie while the United States got rid of a few lampreys. Ah, diplomacy.

  This is the sad nature of the invasive species. The Great Lakes ecosystem had been evolving for millennia without having to worry about the sea lamprey, and when the beast showed up, the complex web of organisms went into shock. The problem had arrived so suddenly there wasn’t time for the victims to find a solution, for an ecosystem is a delicate dance of checks and balances: A predator evolves a weapon and the prey evolves a defense in a graceful game of one-upmanship. Sure, it’s inevitable over evolutionary time that a new species may arrive in an ecosystem without human assistance—a bird riding a hurricane to an island, for instance—but our global economy has helped shuttle innumerable species around the world, be it a mussel stowed away in the ballast of a ship or a seed caught in a boot. The sea lamprey simply took advantage of the freebie we threw at it.

  Canadian and American wildlife officials around the Great Lakes are waging perpetual war against the lamprey. At their disposal are a variety of weapons. There’s a poison, called lampricide, that targets the things without harming other fish. Barriers that block their upstream migrations also help. But no method is more creative than the good ol’ lamprey mass sterilization. Crews will round up a whole mess of lampreys, chemically castrate the males, and ship the females off for research. Infertile males released back into the lakes will compete for the right to mate, yet will fire blanks when it’s time to perform. It sounds far-fetched, but it’s helping keep the population in check. And hell, it never hurts to emasculate a few lampreys.

  Assassin Bug

  PROBLEM: Some insects just can’t be bothered to get gnawed on alive.

  SOLUTION: The assassin bug impales its prey with superelongated, needle-like mouthparts, sucks out their juices while they’re attached to its face, and then sticks their corpses to its back as camouflage.

  Perhaps evolution’s most beautiful dichotomy is that it is at once a force of total chance and total order. The way your parents’ genes combined to make you and your siblings is random. But the traits you bear make you either more suitable or less suitable to the forces of natural selection—for very specific, nonrandom reasons. A food chain may seem like chaos, yet there’s an order to things: A mountain lion will maul a rabbit, and never the other way around. But a mountain lion is a mountain lion and a rabbit is a rabbit because of the random mutations that built their species, and indeed every species on Earth. Thus from randomness arises order.

  So we might call it an inevitability that in the course of his travels around South America Darwin would fall prey not to a predatory cat, but to a far more common foe: the assassin bug, with its huge, strawlike mouthparts that it drives into flesh and uses to suck out blood. “At night I experienced an attack (for it deserves no less a name) of the Benchuca, a species of Reduvius, the great black bug of the Pampas,” Darwin writes in The Voyage of the Beagle. “It is most disgusting to feel soft wingless insects, about an inch long, crawling over one’s body. Before sucking they are quite thin, but afterward they become round and bloated with blood, and in this state are easily crushed.”

  “I AM AFRAID THE SHIP’S ON FIRE. COME AND SEE WHAT YOU THINK OF IT.”

  It’s worth rehashing the radically different travels of Darwin and Wallace, on account of them being so, well, radically different. Assassin bugs tormented Darwin, sure, but one of Wallace’s ships caught on fire. Like, the whole thing. And then it sank.

  Sitting in his cabin on his way back to London from a collecting expedition in South America, a fever-wracked Wallace found the captain’s head peeking through his door, delivering what might be the greatest understatement in the history of natural history: “I am afraid the ship’s on fire. Come and see what you think of it.” The ship was, in fact, a good amount on fire. Wallace made his way to the boats, rescuing only a few notes and sketches—and consigning case after case of specimens to the flames. Sliding down the rope to the escape boat, Wallace burned the skin off his palms, and spent the next ten days having the sun bake the flesh off of him, with no room to curl up and have a sleep, until a vessel bound for England happened to cross the path of the sad crew. Even then, on the voyage back home they damn near starved as nasty storms split their sails. Finally reaching the motherland, Wallace made up for lost food. “Here we are on shore . . . such a dinner! Oh!” he wrote in a letter. “Beef steaks and damson tart, a paradise for hungry sinners.” Sinners? Good God, man, go easy on yourself.

  Darwin continues, describing a peculiar scene that reads more like science fiction than natural history. He caught an assassin bug in Chile—one with an empty belly—and introduced it to a few of his comrades. “When placed on a table, and though surrounded by people, if a finger was presented, the bold insect would immediately protrude its sucker, make a charge, and if allowed, draw blood.” The attack wasn’t painful, Darwin notes, and one officer at the table let the thing feed on him for ten minutes, during which time the assassin bug “changed from being as flat as a wafer to a globular form.”

  Really, there are few insects as clever, ferocious, or unnerving as the aptly named assassin bug, which is pretty much a giant mosquito. While the bolas spider lies in wait, and the tiger beetle runs down its prey, the seven thousand species of assassin bug take an altogether more ninjalike approach. They’re sneakers. Ambushers. They have all kinds of cunning tactics, but what remains constant among them is their weapon: an elongated mouth, called a rostrum, which they slam into their victims. Once through the skin or exoskeleton of the prey—be it a mammal or a fellow insect, depending on the species of assassin—a sheath pulls back and the actual mouthparts emerge. At this point the assassin releases a toxin that paralyzes the victim, which is still very much alive as its insides start to liquefy. The killer then drinks up the soup from the prey impaled right there on its face.

  The most bizarre hunting tactic among the many bizarre hunting tactics of the assassin bugs is what I like to call the Backpack of My Enemies. After draining the insides of prey like ants, some species will arrange the corpses on their sticky backs, piling the bodies so high that the Backpack of My Enemies ends up growing far taller than the assassin itself, making the hunter look like a macabre Santa with a sack of the worst presents a kid could ever ask for. That, as you can imagine, makes the assassin unpalatable to its own enemies, plus has the added benefit of bestowing on it the scent of its prey, thus allowing the hunter to better sneak up on its victims’ comrades.

  TERRIFIED OF SPIDERS? TERRIFIED OF SNAKES? THEN DO I HAVE A CRITTER FOR YOU

  The feather-legged assassin bug gets points for gutsiness, but the equally hyphenated spider-tailed horned viper of Iran wins big-time for the creepiest lure in nature. Think of a rattlesnake whose tail doesn’t rattle, but instead looks just like a spider, with a bulb for an abdomen and little offshoots that look like legs. The well-camouflaged snake curls up and gives that tail a wag for hungry birds in the vicinity. When one takes the bait, the snake strikes, loading the greedy bugger with venom. It isn’t quite as fashionable as leg bristles, but then again, it’s a spider-snake.

  Another variety goes one step furthe
r with the masquerade. Termites of course have mounds, which emit lots of nice termite smells. So instead of coating itself in corpses, the assassin that targets these termites applies the nest material to its back to become one with the environment. After spearing a termite and sucking it dry, the assassin will keep the victim on the rostrum and dangle it into the mound. This is of some concern to the victim’s compatriots not because of a sort of emotional attachment, but because as social insects, termites react to sickness and death like the ants under attack from zombifying fungi or decapitating flies do. They’re programmed to remove any dead or dying termites from the mound, a behavior the assassin is there to exploit. Any rescuers are themselves stabbed, drained, and dangled, one after the other, perhaps dozens in a sitting.

  Still another species doesn’t just lure ants, but waits for the ants to attack it, a risky and extreme rarity in nature (lures like the anglerfish’s are one thing, but the hunter doesn’t want to die in the process). The nymph feather-legged assassin bug—with its big, fluffy masses of bristles on its rear pair of limbs—positions itself among foraging ants and rapidly twitches its legs. When the dupe comes to investigate, the assassin doesn’t react until the much larger ant clamps onto its leg and starts dragging it away. But sure enough, the assassin whips around onto the ant’s back and impales it.

  The assassin bugs that attack humans, known as kissing bugs because they’re attracted to exhalations and are therefore prone to stab around the mouth, aren’t nearly so clever, but they’re still deadly. It isn’t the wound itself that kills, but the feces the assassin leaves behind. If the victim gives the wound a scratch, the surrounding droppings can make their way inside, transmitting a protozoan parasite that causes Chagas disease: severe cardiac and digestive problems that may only manifest decades after a bite.

  It’s this disease, and the South American assassin bugs it rode in on, that some scholars have fingered as the cause of Darwin’s death. After all, he suffered from chronic health problems—fatigue, vomiting, abdominal pain—that all but incapacitated him, particularly in his later years. Others say it was Crohn’s disease, or even lactose intolerance, or something called cyclical vomiting syndrome, or any number of other maladies. The matter is, for some strange reason, still a matter of fierce debate.

  What’s certain, though, is that the ultimate predictability of nature, death, came on April 19, 1882, to one of the most brilliant random assemblages of human genes ever to walk the Earth. The allies who had defended Darwin’s civilization-shaking ideas lobbied to have him buried at Westminster Abbey, a seat of the religious establishment the man had so rankled. And after some wrangling, so it was.

  Through a congregation of the titans of science and government and faith, ten pallbearers marched with the coffin. Among them was Darwin’s cherished friend Alfred Russel Wallace, lanky as ever. Wallace and the expired mind he carried had discovered the greatest idea in human history, an idea so radical that it sent religious figures into a frenzy, yet was so undeniably true that here the pious men were, accepting Darwin’s remains. Darwin and the evolutionists had brought chaos to the idyllic Victorian conception of nature, insisting that survival itself is just one big problem. No creature can avoid its eventual demise, but these bodies of ours are pretty good shots at a solution, however vulnerable they may be to assassin bugs, lactose intolerance, or what have you. Sure, we don’t have toxic hairs to protect us, we can’t invade the bodies of other creatures, and we can’t release clouds of goo to choke our enemies. But damn it, at least we’ve got our friends.

  A Few Parting Words

  Life, as you may have gathered from this book, is death. Destruction comes from above, from below, sideways and diagonally, from parasites and predators and the environment itself. For billions of years life has flourished on this planet, and almost every single bit of that life is today buried in the ground. But that’s not for lack of trying. Creatures have gone to great lengths to survive and reach the ultimate goal: make babies. They’ve faced their trials and found their solutions, however accidentally, evolving and evolving and evolving to culminate in the incredible array of life with which we now have the honor of sharing a planet.

  It shocks the human mind that a creature could evolve to weaponize insulin or snot, to mind-control an ant or caterpillar, to fight with its penis or its mustache. And the human mind stretches to its limits to comprehend that all of this is automatic. Boom, that first microorganism came into being, and the rest has since fallen into place. No guiding hand, no purpose, just species battling each other and the elements. They create problems for the opposite sex or for their prey, problems that the opposite sex or their prey in turn solve. Species grow faster or tougher, taller or tinier, marching through time, adapting to one trial after another.

  It’s easy to forget this isn’t over. Species will keep on evolving, sometimes right before our very eyes. There’s no way to predict if the aye-aye’s finger will grow still longer, or if antechinus sex will grow still more frenzied, but we can say with confidence that evolution now must grapple with a complicating factor: us.

  Earth has never seen a force like humanity. We pull down mountains and gouge great holes in the earth. We’ve transformed our climate and polluted the bejesus out of the seas. We’ve driven countless species to extinction as others struggle to hold on. Humanity is Earth’s biggest problem, and it’ll be the species that stumble upon solutions to us that will make it. Individuals that can better withstand warming and acidifying seas, for instance, will survive to pass down their genes for this resilience.

  Not since the pioneering days of Maria Sibylla Merian and Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace has the work of the natural historian been more critical. Saving the species we’re imperiling requires understanding them. And so Brian Fisher, iPad in hand, slogs through the jungle in search of the hero ant. Tierney Thys wrangles the ocean sunfish, the biggest bony fish in the world, tagging them so she can study their movements in rapidly changing oceans. And Mariella Superina, after all these years, still scours the deserts of Argentina in search of the mysterious pink fairy armadillo. They’re just three explorers among the multitudes of scientists trying to make sense of this mad planet of ours.

  Who knows—maybe we’ll end up solving the problem that is us. And I don’t mean extincting ourselves. Evolution gave us these great big brains, after all. Perhaps we can figure out how to live on this planet without destroying it. Because if we don’t, the only other option is space.

  But hell, at least we could take a few water bears with us for company. Or is that wildly irresponsible? That’s wildly irresponsible, isn’t it.

  Acknowledgments

  My grandparents lived up in the mountains, far away from the suburbs, where things called animals lived. For instance, the bats, my grandfather explained to a tiny me, could squeeze right between the backboard of his basketball hoop and the garage it was flush against. But there’s just no clearance, I remember protesting, though clearly not in that exact language. Yet true enough they roosted there, no doubt scoffing at my judgment, as bats are wont to do.

  Thank you, Grandpa, and thank you, Grandma, for bringing me into that world. Thank you, Dad, for rescuing the tick-infested pet rabbit we found in a park, a sad creature I named Bugsy, because I was an asshole. Thank you, Mom, for the snark, which either got readers through this book or made them put it down after the first chapter. For the former, thanks for sticking with it. Thank you, Melissa, for giving me permission to write about your kid pooping on a lawn, thus entering his exploits into the public record.

  A thousand thanks to Superagent David Fugate. I seriously have no clue how you have the energy for all of this. You’re a master. And thank you to my editor over there at Penguin, Meg Leder, for guiding this book to a place where it made sense other than in my own head. You’re a fantastic editor. You as well, Shannon Kelly. Thank you for laughing at my dumb jokes.

  Brian Chen, you know what
you’ve done.

  Sorry, that wasn’t meant to sound like you stabbed me once in a bar fight. I mean I really appreciate what you’ve done.

  My respect to the entire Wired clan. For Betsy Mason taking the chance on a half-baked—perhaps quarter-baked—idea for a column. For Chuck Squatriglia and his many tasteful edits, and less than tasteful taste in metal.

  Then there’s the trio of brilliant scientific minds who were so kind as to give the manuscript a gander. Danielle Venton, radio personality and friend of goats. Nadia Drake, jungle traipser and ofttimes horse. And Gwen Pearson, one hell of an entomologist who knows better than to bother with mammals like goats and horses.

  I’d like to thank every single biologist who ever made the mistake of answering my phone call or e-mail asking for an interview. Some of you have been amazing, some of you have been rotten bastards, but every single one of you has put on a clinic for me. I’m humbled, immensely grateful, and a better person because of you all.