Comments on: How The Wasp Got Her Handle

By: I’ve Got Your Missing Links Right Here (24 November 2012) – Phenomena

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:26:31 +0000

[...] The story of the portable beetle, with handles that termites can hold, as told by Matthew Cobb the style of Kipling. And then, a follow-up story on a handled wasp! [...]

By: I’ve got your missing links right here (24 November 2012) | Not Exactly Rocket Science | My Blog

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 21:02:18 +0000

[...] The story of the portable beetle, with handles that termites can hold, as told by Matthew Cobb the style of Kipling. And then, a follow-up story on a handled wasp! [...]

By: marksolock

marksolock — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 02:38:28 +0000

Reblogged this on Mark Solock Blog.

By: abrotherhoodofman

abrotherhoodofman — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 19:51:04 +0000

If it had a full head of hair, would its ovipository activity be hindered by morning bed head syndrome?

Or would its hair automatically part in the middle every morning?

By: Matthew Cobb

Matthew Cobb — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 19:15:35 +0000

Um, it started short and got long? Mind you, you raise a point I didn’t deal with in my haste – WHY does I boscii have such a long ovipositor? It doesn’t seem to specialise on maggots that anther species with shorter ovipositors can’t parasitise. So why the handle?

By: abrotherhoodofman

abrotherhoodofman — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:59:43 +0000

“…the structure is so long that the wasp even has a groove in its head to make space for the handle…”

Talk about being hornswoggled… I realize most evolutionary changes are incremental, but one can almost have sympathy for the ID crowd when examples like this are found.

I mean, how did it do dat? Can somebody please provide a slow-motion film of Inostemma boscii‘s evolution over the last few million years? Thanks!

By: Matthew Cobb

Matthew Cobb — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:13:19 +0000

Thanks – it was incredibly difficult to find out! Neither their website nor their FB page explains it. I eventually found the definition I gave above, squirreled away on the ‘timeline’ page, which pleasingly included the Imperial Bureau of Entomology’.

By: Alec

Alec — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:27:13 +0000

CABI has gone through many incarnations: currently it stands for the slightly more grammatical “Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International”

By: Justin Zimmer

Justin Zimmer — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:25:02 +0000

This species alone makes good material for a horror movie. “It began with a headache.”

By: Ben Goren

Ben Goren — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 16:05:35 +0000

I think the great success of Alien as a horror film is precisely because it’s generally a rather unremarkable picture of parasitism, with the notable exception that it’s the parasitism of the small applied to the parasitism of the large, especially including us.

That is, replace the humans in the film with, say, ants or caterpillars or what-not, and the biology isn’t all that bizarre. What’s terrifying is the thought of ourselves in those sorts of circumstances.

A suggestion to those looking for inspiration for SF works: insects. I’d love to see, for example, a parable of the Monarch butterfly migration, set instead as spaceships traversing the galaxy.