As will soon become apparent, I spent a hunk of yesterday afternoon setting up a new RSS feed reader. After a bit of searching, I chose a program called BlogBridge, for a couple of reasons. One is that it is written in java, and therefore works on my Windows laptop and my Linux desktop. Another is that it allows me to easily "synchronize" preferences and feed subscriptions between the two, offering the convenience of something like Bloglines or Google Reader with the beefiness of a rich client application.

Anyway, the upshot is that now I can bring you links from blogs other than Pharyngula. Such as this, from Carl Zimmer.

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.

As I believe the kids these days say, read the whole thing.

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