They discover that a wasp enslaves spiders to satisfy their will | NEWS THE INDUSTRY

A species of wasp found in the Amazon Ecuador is able to turn a spider into a zombie-like drone, which, enchanted by the wasp, leaves its colony to comply with the orders of its new owner.

This story actual microscopic terror are researchers from University of British Columbia (UBC, Canada) who studied in Ecuador the different types of parasites that live in the nests of spiders Anelosimus eximius.

The authors, who published this discovery in Ecological etomology, They detail the first example of this slave relationship between a new wasp of the species Zatypota and a social spider Anelosimus eximiu.

"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 student at the Department of Zoology of UBC.

Using data collected 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.

The expert is surprised, because the wasp forces the spider to leave his colony, which happens very rarely. Anelosimus eximiu is one of about 25 species of social spiders in the world, living in large colonies, cooperating for the capture of prey, sharing the duties of their parents and rarely moving away from their nest.

It is not yet known how the wasps get there, but scientists believe that this can be caused by an injection of hormones that gives the spider the impression that it is at a different stage of life or that it is scattered from the colony.