I got this from wikio
Thanks to Paul Hamaker at Examiner.com , I found this at National Geographic:
Fire ants are widely hated, because they bite people's feet, kill infant birds, short out electrical units, and outcompete native ant species.
But as punishing as fire ants can be, they've got serious competition in parasitic phorid flies.
Plentiful in fire ants' South American home ranges, phorid fly females inject their eggs into the fire ants.
The egg develops into a maggot, which appears to control the ant's behavior. The maggot "directs" the ant to a moist, leafy place—phorid larvae are vulnerable to drying out—a safe distance from other fire ants.
The larva then eats the ant's brains, causes the ant's head to fall off, then finally "hatches" from the ant's hollowed-out head about 40 days later.
"Not only is it decapitating it, but it turns the ant into a zombie," said Sanford Porter, a research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.
More videos are there at US Department of Agriculture- videos that show a hatched phorid fly coming out of a fire-ant's head and fire-ants fighting phorid flies. Check them.
Devastating, really.
kattradhu kai mann alavu
ReplyDeleteArticles like this and of Vilayanoor Ramachandran poses lot of questions that were unanswered or left without mentioning and the necessity to restart the learning process when spritiuality is concerned.
ReplyDeleteYes, the problem of consciousness and the world is a deep one- and I think we will never get a satisfactory answer to that one.
ReplyDeleteBut what do you think this tells us about life?
Is it good or bad?