( intro music )
Parasites are not degenerates,
they're actually maybe the most successful life form on earth.
And they do all sorts of amazing things.
They were using their hosts
for all sorts of nefarious purposes
to get what they needed.
If you see a ladybug huddled over some little bit of fluff,
you're looking at a zombie bodyguard.
( applause )
So originally when they were organizing this talk,
they were trying to convince us to,
dress up and I wasn't quite willing to do that.
But, I did bring my favorite T-shirt, so...
If you can't tell, that's a schistosome there.
( audience laughing )
So, my goal in this
in photographing these creatures was to...
get past this visceral aversion we all have towards parasites,
and try to show how amazing these creatures really are!
So, if I'm going to try to convince you
that parasites are cool,
I'm going to start with the star of the show.
So this is a ladybug
standing guard over the cocoon of a wasp
and the way this works, is that wasp lays an egg,
it injects an egg into that ladybug
and the egg hatches and it grows inside the ladybug
and the larval wasp inside actually knows
to avoid the vital organs of that ladybug
because if it chews on those vital organs
it will kill the ladybug and it will die too.
So it avoids the vital organs and when it's ready to come out,
it pushes its way out of the abdomen of that ladybug
and it spins its cocoon. And the problem is
this cocoon is a very vulnerable stage
in the lifecycle of this wasp. It's just sitting there immobile
ready to be eaten by any predator that walks by.
So, that's why it's gotten this ladybug to stand guard over it.
And the amazing thing is this ladybug will sit there
twitching for days over this, this wasp
and if it's able to survive the seven days
that the wasp takes to develop into an adult
the ladybug can actually recover.
The mind control can wear off
and that ladybug can go to re-grow its internal organs
and go on to reproduce.
This is the wasp that's responsible for that,
this is Dinocampus coccinellae,
it's, she's barely a centimeter long
and I can tell she's a female, both
because she's got this ovipositor at the end, the stinger
that she uses to inject the eggs
and also because this species is parthenogenetic, which means
it doesn't need to fertilize its eggs to reproduce,
it can clone itself,
and so it injects an egg into the ladybug,
It does not need to be fertilized,
and all of those eggs will develop to be more females.
The entire species is female.
Actually there has been four or five males
that has been identified over the course of
studying this creature and
frankly I don't know how that really works,
I don't know how parthenogenesis works. It's crazy.
and it will have to be the topic of another discussion.
Now ladybugs are not the only ones
that get turned into bodyguards.
There's another wasp in this family Braconidae
that infects caterpillars
and in this case it injects several dozen eggs
at the same time.
Those eggs hatch inside the caterpillar
and just like the ladybug
they know to avoid the internal organs
of the caterpillar, just like the ladybug
they have a virus that helps them.
It's a different kind of virus
but in this case the virus tricks the immune system
of the caterpillar to protect, to hide these invaders
and the virus actually changes the metabolism
of the caterpillar so that it gorges itself
and it prevents the caterpillar
from transforming into an adult,
so the virus turns the caterpillar
into a feeding machine for these wasp larva.
So this is a video of this process. It starts with the
adult wasp stinging and injecting those eggs
into a newly hatched caterpillar. Those caterpillars
then go about their normal life for the next week
feeding and growing
and waiting for those wasp larva to emerge.
When they are ready they chew their way
through the skin of the caterpillar.
And they come out by the dozens.
So they actually spin their cocoon
as they are emerging from the caterpillar.
The amazing thing about this process is that
the caterpillar survives, it wakes up,
it crawls on the top of the pile of cocoons and it spins that
additional layer of protective silk.
And the reason for this,
the entire purpose of the protection
is to prevent this.
This is a hyperparasitoid wasp
injecting its egg into the parasitic wasp
that just emerged from the caterpillar.
So an additional layer of parasitism
above the mind controlling one.
It's pretty cool.
So this theme of trying to protect
that delicate larval stage... that pupation,
that's a common theme.
And there's another wasp in different group
that uses a different approach than the bodyguard style.
What it does is, it catches the spider
and lays an egg on its back.
So this is a spider that lives in the
palm plantations of Costa Rica
and it's got a wasp larva hanging on its back.
This is one that has hatched out
and it's feeding on hemolymph, the blood of that spider.
And what it does when it's ready to pupate,
instead of turning that spider into a bodyguard,
it gets the spider to build a special kind of web.
And so normally webs are designed to catch insects,
this web is designed
to support the weight of the cocoon.
And so the wasp larva waits
until the spider's done building this web,
it then kills it and then hangs its cocoon
safely off the floor of the forest.
So this is the stage
where the spider has just finished building that web
and the wasp returns the favor
by killing it and eating it.
And this is that specialized web.
And you can tell what the spiders built
because the spider silk is white
and wasp silk is yellow.
So this is a video starting with,
after the spider has been killed.
That wasp larva is feeding on every last drop
of the spider's blood in order to store up enough energy
to transform into an adult.
And then when it's ready to transform,
it's finished digesting that spider
it then drops its own silk off of the spider web
and spins its cocoon.
And you can actually see how it uses its head
to hollow out the cavity inside of that cocoon.
These... these wasps have figured out
this mind control thing pretty well.
And the, the queen of all mind controlling wasps is
the emerald cockroach wasp.
So this is a wasp that hunts cockroaches to feed its young
And it is more cunning and sophisticated
than your typical predator like a lion or a shark.
So what it does is, it starts by paralyzing the cockroach.
It stings it right behind its head,
paralysis the cockroach and then it snakes
its stinger into the brain of the cockroach
where it has special censors
so that it can grope around the brain
and find exactly the part that is responsible
for generating the motivation for movement.
And it disables that part. And what that means is
the cockroach is fully functional,
all of its muscles work
but it cannot generate the will to move on its own.
Instead it takes its queues from the wasp.
So the wasp comes back,
it holds the antenna of that cockroach,
with its mouth and it leads it
as if walking a dog to its burrow,
where it lays an egg on its belly
and buries it to be eaten alive by its babies.
And those wasp larva just like the others
they know how to avoid the internal organs
they can keep it fresh as long as possible
and on top of that,
they actually smear this disinfecting substance
on the inside of the cockroach to keep it from rotting.
This is a horsehair worm,
it's using its host as both
housing and transportation. So in this case,
the worm grows up inside the cricket
and once it gets a little cramped in there,
it wants to come out. And really this worm
has a free living part of its life stage.
It doesn't live his whole life in the cricket.
But the problem is where it comes out,
it has to be wet, it's an aquatic worm
when it comes out.
So if it came out in dry land it would dry up and die.
So it makes the cricket go find water
so that it can jump in, commit suicide
and that worm can go on to continue its life cycle.
So, in that pond or in that stream
the worm will go find a mate, it will lay a bunch of eggs,
those eggs hatch and they burrow into mosquito larva.
And they insist themselves in a mosquito larva,
so when the mosquitoes emerge and they fly out,
their cysts are still there
and that mosquito lives its normal life,
it dies on land and it gets eaten by a cricket.
And the worm cyst actually knows
when it's inside of a cricket and that's when it knows,
it can start developing. That's how the life cycle continues.
This is an ant that has been infected by
'Ophiocordyceps'.
And this fungus, it gets the ant
to crawl up the stalk of a plant
out till the end of a leaf and it kills the ant there
so that when the fungus sends
its reproductive structures out
those spores are better able to disperse
onto the forest floor.
This is actually a really diverse group of fungi
and each species of fungus has its own host
and it gets its host to clampdown
in different parts of the plant.
Some of them are at the tip of the leaf,
some of them are on the underside,
some of them are at the base of a tree
and it's thought that they are manipulating their host
to maximize the ability to disperse on to more ants.
And so they've actually shown there are places
where the fungus is getting the ant to die
above the foraging lines of its colony.
So that when those spores come out,
they're more likely to get in contact
with more ants.
And actually the white eye you see here,
that's fungus as well.
So what the fungus does is,
it hollows out the entire inside of that ant
and it just so happens that the exoskeleton
right in front of eye, it's thin enough
that you can see the fungal tissue
through the eye membrane.
So this is a video of an ant
this is a different species of ant.
That's also been infected by this
cordyceps fungus-- Ophiocordyceps fungus.
It's in its last hour of life.
It's just twitching there
and the fungus has forced it to bite down on edge of this leaf.
And what happens is that first night
after that fungus kills the ant
it bursts through, the weaker joints
of the exoskeleton and spends the next week,
growing a reproductive stock
out of the back of the ant's head.
Now...
my favorite parasite that I photographed
is the Rhizocephala.
The Rhizocephala is a tiny little parasitic barnacle
that infects sheep crabs. This is a sheep crab here.
And what it does is it gets into the sheep crab
and if the sheep crab started off as a male
it turns it into a female. It feminizes the crab
and that's because only female crabs
have this structure that can house eggs.
And so the parasite waits for this feminized male
to grow this egg chamber, it lays its own eggs
in that egg chamber and then it activates
the maternal care instinct of this crab
so that it thinks it's pregnant
and it will care for the eggs of the parasite.
Then every two weeks,
those eggs mature and they hatch out
and they go on to infect more crabs.
So what you see here is
every little speck in this photo
is a newly hatched parasitic barnacle
that is going out to infect a new crab.
So let me, let me back up and tell little more about
where the story came from, where the idea came from.
So I was working with my editor Todd James
and you know, he just said look we got to figure out
a fresh approach to this,
it's got to be something different.
And you know, I agreed, the pictures of parasites
I had seen to that point were like jars of leeches or
a worm getting pulled out of somebody's eye and its like--
They were very successful in grossing you out,
but they really failed in getting you to appreciate
how incredible these creatures are.
But then there's also the sake of this,
this problem of okay, what, how do I light these creatures,
these parasites in a new way.
Because up until that point, macro photography for me was
find a cool bug, shine some light on it,
take a picture.
You know, you could make it a sharp light,
you could make it soft light,
you could light if from this way or that way,
that's about it. I mean how do I,
how do I take this to a next level?
How I find a more interesting way
to light these creatures?
And I had this idea while I was sitting
in my friend Stacy's apartment in Oakland.
And I don't remember what we're talking about
because I was distracted
by the quality of light on her face.
She was sitting in front of a window.
This is Stacy in front of her window in Oakland
and the window light was coming around her head,
lighting the sides of her cheeks and her nose
and showing the topography in a way,
that I never really thought about before.
I thought how do I scale this down
to a parasite level.
Can I use this to light parasites
and show the shape and contours in a new way?
And so I had my Stacy light, I had my volcano light
I had this idea of how to light backgrounds to emphasize
the drama and action going on,
but you know, what does that really look like
to implement in the field.
Well, let me show you.
Most of the work was done in hotel rooms.
So this is a hotel room in Costa Rica,
where I'm trying to photograph this
spider being parasitized by a wasp
there's buckets of spiders everywhere
that I'm trying to hide from the housekeeping staff
so they won't throw them out.
And then, you know,
hotel rooms really aren't well-designed for photography,
so there is a lot of moving furniture around
and in this case, what I'm trying to do is
I'm trying to set up a time lapse
of these fungus flowers in South Dakota, growing,
and I borrowed this light that had been confiscated
from an illegal marijuana growing operation in Spearfish
( laughter ) And had been donated to the University
who then lent it to me. And after all this effort, it totally failed.
It was not useful at all.
And I ended up building a lot of my own contraptions,
lighting contraptions in this case
I was trying to use this fiber-optic linelight
to build a makeshift scanner, to scan this plant
because there's a beautiful quality of light
that flatbed scanners produce on flowers
and I wanted to try to make that and it
again totally failed. It was
a pain in the butt to use, it didn't really workout.
This is the setup I used to photograph the cover
in a lab in Montréal.
And so I was able to set up in some research labs,
which has some advantages and disadvantages.
The main disadvantage is sometimes
you don't have a lot of space,
this is in Boulder at P. Johnson's lab
where I'm trying to photograph this deformed frog.
Of all of these creatures, though,
the most difficult to photograph
was actually that cricket,
and I visited this lab in New Mexico,
a couple of times where Ben Hanelt had
these infected crickets in his lab.
And the first time they all died
the night before I got there, the second time
they weren't ready the worms took too long to,
to mature so they weren't ready
when I got there and I just said
you know what, forgot this and I packed them into my bag
and I flew back with them to California.
And so my housemates at this point
are used to this kind of nonsense
and one of them is a documentary film maker
and so he filmed me,
photographing these crickets, so...
I kept them in the,
in the hot water heater room,
where they would stay warm. This is my kitchen.
And the thing about these crickets and the worms
is that you can actually tell
when the worms are ready to come out.
They actually turn dark brown,
and you can see them coiled up
inside the belly of these crickets.
And so I'm setting up my fiber-optic lights
and getting ready to photograph these things.
Not my best hair day.
( laughter )
Most of this stuff happens
at 2 o'clock in the morning and so I
sort of didn't remember that he was filming me that day.
And so, I'm actually putting a layer of Rain X down on the glass
and so that beads up the water nicely.
And then I put the crickets in the fridge,
for a few minutes to cool them down
so they wouldn't hop all over the place.
And the liquid that I'm using is not actually water,
it's called cricket saline, it's a solution that mimics
the internal chemistry of the cricket.
So, that when the worms come out they don't freak out.
They think they're still inside the cricket.
So that picture took me about
twenty-three days to figure out.
Now, a lot of that I did at home and so it was not like
I was working on it, 24 hours a day,
some days it was only a couple of hours, but
all the tricks with the Rain X, with the fridge,
with the cricket saline. These are not things
that I knew about ahead of time.
There are things that I just had to work out
on the fly, through one iteration after the next.
And you figure out a problem, or, you come across a problem
you just have to figure out a solution.
The cricket's too jumpy, the worm's freaking out,
the water doesn't look right and
you just have to take what, what you've solved
and build on that.
And so there was a point early on in the story
where my editor, Todd wanted to see my...
my progress on the story and...
you know, he didn't really have time to
look through all my pictures, he wanted to send me--
he wanted me to send him a small selection.
And really I wanted him to see all my pictures because
I wanted to show him all the different variations I did.
I assumed he was going to tell me,
oh, go back and shoot that from another angle
and I wanted to be able to tell him,
'look man, I tried all the angles.'
So, but he asked for, he asked for a limited selection
and so I was scanning through these pictures,
it was late at night I was listening to some
electronic music to keep me awake.
And all of a sudden this, this images on my screen
started to sync up
with the music I was listening to
and I had this idea that 'wait a minute!'
If I can just take all of these images
and I can create a stop motion
by playing them all at 15 frames a second.
That way in five minutes
Todd can see every image I have taken
and all the iterations and variations
I did in between and I just threw
the layer of music on top just for, for kicks.
By the end of the story I had 33,000 pictures
and even at 15 frames a second,
that's a very long video so
I cut that down and here is the edited version
of that original...
Dubstep parasite music video. ( laughter )
( dubstep music )
( applause )
( outro music )