When their crops are plagued by caterpillars, farmers often turn to wasps for help. These wasps are hardened parasites: they lay their eggs inside the caterpillars, and once these eggs hatch the baby wasps eat the caterpillar from inside out. But the wasps themselves are parasitized by organisms that manipulate their host's reproduction! Is this Nature's way of enacting poetic justice in response to the wasps' cruelty? Join the conversation to find out!

Speaking of poetry, Aditi, John, Julian, and Lev also discuss what they read for inspiration. For some, the amount of reading done for work pulls them away from reading for pleasure, but for others it brings out their appreciation of genres like science fiction. Listen in to hear more about the writing that inspires us.

Find more examples of the wasps’ weird reproduction, called parthenogenesis, or virgin births, here: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141219-spectacular-real-virgin-births

Find the scientific paper demonstrating the link between bacterial infections and parthenogenesis in parasitic wasps here: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/87/7/2424.full.pdf

You can also check out the books and show we mention: I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong, Intuition by Allegra Goodman, Solaris by Stanisław Lem, and “Planet Earth” by BBC America.

Find us at https://caltechletters.org/podcasts/

Contact us at [email protected]

Tweet Lev @LMT_spoon

Upgoer5 editor: https://splasho.com/upgoer5/

*** The cover image is from the 1910 book “Annual report, including a report of the insects of New Jersey, 1909,” accessed via the Internet Archive Book Images: https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/18405644036/. It shows an insect egg parasite, Trichogramma pretiosa, very much enlarged.

To celebrate the launch of Biosphere, we invite you to join our conversation about some new beginnings in the microbial world and in our scientific paths. We often think that the birth of live young is a special characteristic of some animals. Mammals do it, some sharks do it, and it would totally make sense if no single-celled microorganisms did it. But that is not the case! We talk about one example of a bacterium, Epulopiscium fishelsoni, that lives in the guts of Regal Tangs, such as Dory the Fish, that nurtures little babies inside of it until they grow up, explode their parent, and move on to bigger and better things. Epulopiscium roughly translates to “guest at a fish’s banquet”. Find out if this is a banquet that you want to join in this episode!

Aditi, John, Julian, and Lev, all had different experiences starting in science. For one of us, this involved a difficult choice between sea sponges and human disease. For another---lots and lots of spiders. Tune in to hear our stories.

You can learn about the discovery of E. fishelsoni here: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/18/us/in-the-world-of-bacteria-a-behemoth.html

You can learn more about bacteria giving birth to live young and reproducing in other weird ways here: https://micro.cornell.edu/research/epulopiscium/binary-fission-and-other-forms-reproduction-bacteria/

Find us at https://caltechletters.org/podcasts/

Contact us at [email protected]

Tweet Lev @LMT_Spoon

***The cover image is CC-BY SA 4.0 from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Regal_Tang_sketch.jpg. Not only charismatic movie stars, Regal Tangs house a lot of wonderful biology.

Biosphere is a podcast that captures the curiosity, bewilderment, elation, and occasional frustration that we, Caltech Biology PhD students, experience as scientists. In every episode of Biosphere, we have unscripted discussions about the living world and our part in it. If you've ever wondered how things like poetic justice, fitting in, and instability manifest themselves in the biologist's eye, join the conversation with Biosphere.

Find us at https://caltechletters.org/podcasts/

Contact us at [email protected]

Tweet us @LMT_Spoon