Video: decapitated wasp grabs its own head and flies away

“Never eat anything bigger than your head” - B. Kliban

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I just made a B Kliban reference on another thread like two hours ago. Absolutely delighted to see another.

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Hey, not all wasps are the aggressive ones you have to worrying about stinging you! Those are just the social vespids like yellowjackets. The great majority tend mind their own business, and mostly just use stings on other insects or spiders, disabling them so their offspring can feast on their internal organs while…um.

Anyway, bees and ants are pretty cool. :neutral_face:

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From the video, it looks like there might be a strand of something still connected to the head. If there’s still a bit of a neural connection, it would explain that weird fumbling. Makes it even more horrific though.

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This is why I remove the wings before I remove the brain. It makes it easier to keep them in place

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Oooh, just how stretchy are human spinal cords? Asking for a friend.

Wasp later found wearing its own head as a hat

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Bluetooth connection. Wasp is fine, as long as it gets decent signal.

Consistency of toothpaste, as per anatomy prof, so not really at all. Though it has a lot of a lot of supportive “armor”, including dura mater ( literally " tough mother").

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That is both a better and worse answer than I was expecting. Thank you.

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A grotty soldier beetle! Well, there went their chance to make and serve jam madeleines. Predatorily or whatever.

I mean I guess ants could implement a lo-rez web browser including the pop-over vTuber videos and stuff? oh it’s just like conky! etc. Good way to leave notes for the neighbor, getting the ants to pop out and form words just as they arrive? Straight up soil prep and gardening?

eta: Wouldn’t hold my breath for headless insectile web client operation.

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It kind of depends on what you mean by a brain. The ventral nerve cord stretches the whole length of an insect’s body, and includes multiple ganglia that do a lot of things that are done by the brain in vertebrates.

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Nerves are quite stretchy; everytime we take a step the nerves in our leg need to stretch and contract as the leg moves. The stretchiest insect nerves can be pulled to 3x resting length before getting damaged.

That isn’t what is going on with the wasp in the video, though. The brain is gone and no part of it is still connected to the body. Flight control is done in the thorax, but it would have had a hell of time trying to land without eyes or antenna

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Here’s another Kliban ref that, in a way, speaks to the wasp’s dilemma: “Know Your Bod

Title of absurd graphic of human anatomy, from Whack Your Porcupine

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“My old man’s got this ultimate set of tools. I can fix it.”

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