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October 11 - November 10, 2022
goldenrod gallfly.
interest in the possibility of insect sentience is growing.
a funnel placed over a jar of wine or overripe fruit will lure fruit flies in and confound their attempts to exit.
The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery,
Some experts believe that octopuses were the first creatures on Earth to evolve consciousness,
Spiders, for instance, demonstrate intelligent behavior.
These spiders will also move around an object that blocks the spider’s view of its prey, which demonstrates “object permanence” by the spider.
published the first demonstration of mirror self-recognition (MSR) in an invertebrate.
Funnel ants use bits of leaf, wood, or mud as sponges. Holding the sponge by her mouth, the ant dangles it into a desired source of nourishing liquid (e.g., fruit pulp or the body fluids of prey) before carrying the wetted sponge back to the nest. This technique enables an ant to transport ten times more fluid than she could otherwise carry.
Digger wasps use flat pebbles as tools to tamp down the dirt, disguising the entrance to the burrows in which they have buried paralyzed prey to provision their egg once it hatches.
Prevailing scientific opinion has been that these are the mindless mechanical workings of instinct bereft of conscious experience. But there are reasons to be cautious in drawing such conclusions.
They can recognize human faces. They understand the concepts of “same” and “different”
Honeybees also appear to have metacognition—that is, knowledge of their own knowledge.
Most of the research on flies’ inner lives has focused on fruit flies.
two-week generation span
dopamine and serotonin control arousal in both flies and humans.
a brain region called the central complex, whose functional equivalent in mammalian brains is the superior colliculus.
And they sleep.
fruit flies exhibit rational decision making.
This “mate choice copying,” in which the perceived attractiveness of mates is affected by the opinions of others, is widespread in the animal kingdom, including in human women.
Often with good reason, scientists have tended to steer clear of anthropomorphism, the attribution of human qualities to nonhuman animals.
insects and vertebrates don’t have a shared conscious ancestor,
We must be careful, however, to distinguish pain, as a felt experience, from nociception, which refers to a purely mechanical reaction to a noxious (both words from Latin nocere, to harm) stimulus without any negative sensation.
Without consciousness, even the most neurologically complex body experiences no feelings, no pain, no suffering—and
evidence did not support pain in insects, at least not as it occurs in humans. Even so, they recommended anesthetizing insects as a desirable practice to guard against the possibility of pain and to preserve an attitude of respect toward living organisms
British biologist, Marian Dawkins, in 1980 also concluded that insects have some capacity for pain.
Praying mantises, crickets, and honeybees respond to injections of the pain-killing opioid drug morphine with lower defensive responses to an unpleasant event, and the strength of the response is proportional to the morphine dose. This analgesic effect can be blocked by a drug, naloxone, that counteracts morphine’s effects in vertebrates. These studies suggest that insects have a general sensitivity to opioids similar to that of vertebrates.
pain. The evidence so far hints that insects are sentient, but that the location of and expression of their pain can differ from ours.
when subjected to a stressful situation from which they cannot escape, flies exhibit a “learned helplessness” response well known from studies of rodents: they give up.
phototaxis—a response either away from or toward light—of
mitigating
Ever since Aristotle proclaimed in the fourth century BCE what was most likely already a widespread assumption: that humans are superior to the other creatures, we have held ourselves in higher esteem than all the rest of creation (though inferior to God and the angels). This conceit was amplified in the 17th century when the influential French philosopher René Descartes reasoned that nonhuman animals—assumed to be lacking thoughts, feelings, and souls—were nothing more than complex machines and therefore ineligible for our moral concern.
turn. Charles Darwin’s contributions to our understanding of evolution demonstrated animals’ shared biological kinship with us, debunking the Cartesian divide
Philosophers call this the precautionary principle.
Great flies have little flies upon their backs to bite ’em, And little flies have lesser flies, and so ad infinitum. And the great flies themselves, in turn, have greater flies to go on; While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on. —AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN*
Flies are accomplished parasites, practicing a survival strategy that involves spending at least part of one’s life history living off the tissues of a host organism, usually without killing the host.
strategy. A parasitoid is like a parasite on steroids. The perpetrator invades the body as a parasite would, but instead of keeping the host alive, the parasitoid ultimately kills the host, having first plundered it for resources.
All of the 10,000 or so named species of flies in the family Tachinidae, informally dubbed killer flies, are parasitoids, all of which develop inside the body of another insect. Because most of those insect hosts are plant-feeders, the parasitoi...
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Parasites and parasitoids have an uncanny ability to feed first only on the nonvital tissues of their hosts.
Like otters and turtles.
A particular form of parasitism, kleptoparasitism, refers to the habit of taking food from a host.
freeloader flies (see the image in Photographs).
You might guess that such an abundant and diverse food reservoir as flies would also play host to their own parasites. Among the most manipulative of these is a Cordyceps fungus whose spores, upon infiltrating a housefly, sprout tendrils that suck up nutrients, causing the fly’s abdomen to swell. When the fungus is sufficiently mature, it turns the fly into a fungus-serving robot. The fly gets an irresistible urge to go to a high place, such as a shrub or a building eave. Arriving at its perch, the fly sticks out its feeding proboscis and uses it as a clamp, gluing itself to the perch. There
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myiasis.
It is the condition of having a fly burrow under your skin. It is not the adult fly who does such an audacious thing, but rather the maggot, which enters after hatching from an egg that the adult fly has deposited on or near your warm, inviting body.
the human botfly (Dermatobia hominis)—which ranges from southeast Mexico through Central and most of South America—has
Over 40 species of mosquitoes and other flies, and one tick, are known to have been used as human-botfly egg couriers.
that these botflies are restricted to hot and humid forests in the New World, and that cattle probably make up the most important host for D. hominis, dogs also being frequent hosts.
The mammoth botfly is known from a single larva found dwelling in the stomach of a 100,000-year-old woolly mammoth exhumed from Siberian permafrost in 1973.
Snot bots
There are snot bots that develop in the throats and sinus cavities of deer, reindeer, moose, and caribou. There is a sheep-nose bot, a horse-nose bot, and a camel-nose bot. Elephants, gazelles, antelope, and warthogs are among their African targets.
