“A mother’s care sometimes knows no bounds. It turns out that crickets manage to forewarn their offspring of lurking spiders, despite the small matter of never actually meeting them.
Jonathan Storm, a behavioural ecologist now at the University of South Carolina Upstate, in Spartanburg, briefly exposed lab-grown female crickets to wolf spiders whose fangs had been immobilised with wax, then studied the behaviour of their subsequent offspring.
He found that their offspring remained motionless for longer in the presence of spider silk or droppings than the offspring of mothers that had not been exposed to spiders.”
Read more at New Scientist
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at first i read this as “jiminy crickets”…sigh. gotta try to wake up before i check out this site!
shouldn’t we be curing AIDS or ignorance?, not finding out about crickets
why does it want me to comment twice?
Interesting……
LC x
Genetic memory eh? Just plug me into the Animus, I’m ready to go!
So do we think it works by some kind of hormone flushing or transmission in the womb or could the DNA of an cricket be changed by a bite? I think the former is the more likely.
Either way do people think it points to alternate theory to natural selection or at least something we have previously overlooked? So do we need to incorporate various details like this into our understanding?
Any ideas?