Terror in nature: they discover a wasp that enslaves spiders for them to fulfill their orders

( Agency N + 1 / Beatriz of Vera). A wasp species recently discovered inside the Amazon of Ecuador is able to turn a spider into a zombie-type drone that lets its colony bend to Your new owner's orders. Researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC, Canada) who studied in Ecuador studied the different types of parasites that live in spider nests Anelosimus eximius.

The authors, who published this conclusion in Ecological Etomology detail the first example of this slave relationship between a new wasp of the species Zatypota and a social spider [19659004] Anelosimus eximiu [19659004]. "The wasps that handle the behavior of spiders have already been observed, but not at such a complex level," according to Philippe Fernández-Fournier, lead author of the study and former master's student in the Department of Zoology of the . ] UBC .

From data collected in in Ecuador for different projects between 2012 and 2017, researchers began to reconstruct the life cycle of the wasp and its parasitic relationship with the spider. is surprised, moreover, because the wasp causes the spider to leave his colony, which happens very rarely.Anelosimus eximiu is one of the 25 or so species of 39 Social spiders in total the world, who coexist in large colonies, cooperate to capture prey, share the duties of parents and seldom move away from their nests.

The method

It is not yet known how the wasps do it, for example Scientists think that this can be caused by an injection of hormones that makes it seem like spider that she is at a different stage of life or that she is scattered from the colony . ] What they found was equal fascinating and horrible : after an adult female wasp placed an egg in the abdomen of a spider, the larva hatches and adheres to the host. Then, presumably, it feeds on the haemolymph similar to the blood of the spider, which grows and takes the body slowly. The spider now "zombified" leaves the colony and waits patiently to be killed and consumed.

After being feasted on the spider the larva enters its protected cocoon, emerging fully formed from nine to eleven days later. "The Wasp completely removes the behavior and brain of the spider and causes it to do something that it would never do, like leaving its nest and transforming a completely different structure, which is very dangerous for these little spiders, "he explains. Samantha Straus, co-author of the study.

This story was originally published in N + 1, a science that adds up.