Well, before reading this... realize that I can't remember where I found this story. Possibly I made it ENIRELY UP. I'll keep hunting.
references at end..
We are familiar with parasites living inside of us, some worms, amoebas, bacteria... and usually we consider this an abnormal situation to be cured of.
However... it is THE WAY OF LIFE. Here we have a collection of TEENSY WEENSY wasps, found in a dodder gall. This showed up on my twitter feed some time ago, Colin Purrington https://twitter.com/colinpurrington, a nature photographer, found them and posted this photo. Let me spell this out. The tiny fairy wasp on the left is possibly a parasite of one of the tiny wasps on the right. That means she grew up inside that wasp and then hatched out. One of the wasps on the right was a parasite inside a weevil which in turn was a parasite living inside a gall of a Dodder plant (special structure that the plant and insect larvae construct to house and feed larva) which is a parasite of various other plants sucking out all its food from them.
Dodder is a vine without leaves. In order to grow, it attaches to other plants and sucks the juices out of them. A parasite. A weevil mom, might lay her eggs inside the dodder stem. She also injects some hormones. The developing egg and hormones interact with the Dodder plant so that the plant produces a gall. That is, it produces a special structure that grows up around the weevil larva that hatcehs out of the egg and protects it and the larva can feed on the gall while it grows. There are tinier wasps flitting about. One of the wasp moms, can smell out those weevil homones and land on the gall and insert her long sensitive ovipositor into the gall tissue like a syringe and sense where the weevil egg is, and she lays HER eggs INSIDE that tiny weevil egg.
While the weevil larvae is growing and eating the gall tissue... the wasp larvae is hatching out and swimming around the weevil larva eating it FROM THE INSIDE slowly enough so that it can keep growing! It will crawl out of the empty shell of the weevil larvae when it is ready to transform into an adult wasp.
But this only accounts for the tiny wasps we find in the gall, what about the TEENSY TINY fairy wasp?
Fairy wasp mom can also smell out weevil hormone infested galls, but that's not good enough for her kids, she injects her ovipositer in there and hunts around for a weevil larva that is infested with wasp larva and lays her eggs INSIDE the wasp larva that's inside the weevil larva that's inside the gall that's attached to the original host plant...
Actually... if the fairy wasp grows successfully, killing it's host tiny wasp... then that wasp won't grow enough to kill the weevil larva it's living in and the weevil larva can survive... hmm... not sure how the fairy wasp escapes it's doubly nested nursury (triply nested... how does it get out of the gall? Maybe it drills painlessly out of the weevil larva and the weevil larva hatches into a weevil and the weevil drills out of the gall and the fairy wasp flies out that hole...
I have to actually go out and find these and watch don't I?
Is that the end of it then?
There are amoeba that can live inside fairy wasps...
Perhaps those amoeba can get a bacterial infection...
Perhaps those bacteria can get infected with some viruses...
Perhaps there is a dodder that parasitises mistletoe which parasitizes an oak
and of course oak roots attach to mushroom mycelia and can suck minerals out of them... all the while the mushroom mycelia suck sugars out of the oak roots, or maybe the roots of another oak tree
and of course some indian pipe plants who also don't have leaves to make food on their own attach THEIR roots to the mushroom mycelia that feed off the oak trees...
How many critters do i got hooked up now?
virus-bacteria-amoeba-fairy wasp-weevil wasp-weevil-dodder-mistletoe-oak-mushroom-indian pipe...
oh wait... the last time i looked at indian pipes... i found some other kind of insect larva living inside those....
While all these critters are sucking juices out of each other they are spreading viruses between each other. Viruses are capable of spreading from one species of critter to a completely different species of critter. In the time scale of a critter's lifetime, they share food, but in the LARGER timescale of 1000s of generations... the viruses don't spread FOOD between critters... they spread GENES. That's right, they are doing genetic modification without evil human laboratories. Been doing it ever since there have BEEN creatures crawling and sprawling all over earth.
This means that different kinds of creatures can catch different genetic diseases from each other. Terrible? well... one disease that a particular line of creatures caught 100 million years ago was... PLACENTAS! That's right, some family of proto-marsupial-reptile kinda critters accumulated enough of these viral genes that... they slowly evolved to grow placentas with these foriegn viral genes and eventually learned to become mammals who give birth to live babies and eventually evolved their stupid pus pimples milk giving breasts (maybe more viral genes?) to feed their newborn babies with and eventually we became us.
Of course all this is pretty intense and higgledy piggley and along the way many of us get eaten or rot away from crazy diseases... That's how it works here on earth.
Remember guys, life eats life to live. If life were not able to be eaten, it would never have been able to evolve at all, on account of it would have piled up a mile high without dying and have used up all food and no more new kids to propell evolution on and on...
Have an adventure.
ok, there ARE Dodder gall weevils in New Jersey
Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of ScienceProceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science
Volume 43 Annual Issue Article 18
1936
Records of a Dodder Gall-Weevil in IowaRecords of a Dodder Gall-Weevil in Iowa
Henry Lee DeanState University of Iowa
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4484&context=pias
there are certainly Chalcid parasitoids of weevils...
fairy wasps (Mymaridae) are not always so host specific
but i can't tell if any of them have been caught parasitizing other parasitoid wasps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairyfly
Finally... I can't find any reports of parasitoids of Dodder Gall Weevils.
So this story is still something of a mystery to me. how much of it is true? how much of it is POSSIBLE?
there are over 60,000 reported species of weevils
over 100,000 reported species of wasps and bees
over 200 reported species of Dodder
ok... Dodder definitely parasitize Mistletoe which parasitizes other plants...
Parasites on parasites: hyper-, epi-, and autoparasitism among flowering plants
Yuliya
Krasylenko, Jakub Těšitel, Gregorio Ceccantini, Mariana
Oliveira-da-Silva, Václav Dvořák, Daniel Steele, Yevhen Sosnovsky,
Renata Piwowarczyk, David M. Watson, Luiza Teixeira-Costa
https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajb2.1590
in all... i think my story is entirely plausible!
