Bugs on drugs and other crazy wackadoodle things.
Curious as to what intoxication looks like for non-humans? If yes, then read on.
This is an ensemble of curious (and somewhat whacky) scientific endeavors, sly parasites and funny accidents.
1. Web developing before it was cool.
In 1948, Swiss pharmacologist Peter N. Witt wanted to know what high spiders would do? Hence he tested web spinning in spiders that were high on a range of psychoactive drugs.
The results were pretty straight forward, the spiders on weed started strumming their hives in G- minor and the ones on cocaine started a betting that spider webs in the neighborhood would last for ever and bring in huge killings ;P
Of course that didn’t happen but web building was severely affected indeed!The spiders were given amphetamine, mescaline, strychnine, LSD, and caffeine. All these disrupted web building.
Caffeine, for example, devastated web production, making the webs smaller and uneven.
Caffeine makes us jittery but for insects like spiders it can be a death knell by stopping production of chemicals important for the nervous systems. Hence the outcome was hardly surprising.
Most drugs reduced web regularity, but interestingly LSD in small doses increased web regularity, or in other words web complexity.
In 1995, a team from NASA repeated Witt’s research on European garden spiders. Spiders were dozed with caffeine, benzedrine, marijuana, and chloral hydrate. This time the complexity of the webs was investigated using fractal theory to investigate the web complexity. They also tried checking if the complexity of spider’s brain signal and complexity of the web were correlated. They ended up corroborating Witt’s work and found that drugs significantly affected web ornamentation.
Web ornamentations are the masses of white thick silk often found on spider webs. They are called stabilimentum, we don’t know what these do. For all we know it could be the spider signing their work.
2. Sisterly love and other drugs?
A study investigated whether social insects can form drug dependency? After why do drugs when you have the support of thousands of community members around you.
But turns out brethren or no brethren you can still develop drug dependency.
Two ant colonies were presented with sugar solutions with decreasing amounts of sugar every subsequent day. However one group had that special something else along with their sugar — morphine.
Long story short, the ants exposed to morphine kept coming back even when there was no sugar. When the addicted ants were given a choice of sugar and morphine, the addicts chose overwhelmingly chose morphine
But don’t worry about the junkie ants. We are not sure if ants develop substance dependence and withdrawal symptoms for morphine like humans. Now that the experiment is over, I guess the ants are probably fine?
3. Hi! I’m fruit fly and I’m an alcoholic
Fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, are the favorite tool for most scientists. We share 60% of our genes with these guys so we can study some of our health issues in these guys including alcohol addition.
Hence it is was no surprise when scientists tried to develop a fly model for alcohol addiction.
Turns out flies can develop vices. Alcohol is dreadfully toxic to them, however even they can increase their alcohol consumption over time. Even when the alcohol was doused with bitter stuff. They simply washed it down like bitter clippers.
But enough of addictions festering in labs. Nature has her own ways of getting insects addicted. Sometimes plants, sometimes fungi trap unsuspecting pollinators and insects to do their bidding.
4. Flying salt shakers of death
Fungal pathogens cannot move on their own and they have places to be. So what do they do? They make unsuspecting insects their chauffeur as well as their luxury sedan.
American cicadas have an interesting life, they spend up to 13 to 17 years underground feeding on plant roots before erupting simultaneously from the earth. While emerging, some of them are parasitized by the fungus Massospora. This fungus would grow inside the insect, consume its organs and ultimately dissolve the cicada’s abdomen, converting the cicadas into storage units for fungal spores.
Just the regular stuff from ones dreams. But that’s not all. This is just step one, now the luxury sedan of the fungi that happens to be this poor cicada must go around dropping fungal spores off.
But how can cicadas with almost of 80% of their body being used as a warehouse by the fungus move? Simple, just a wee bit of psilocybin.
These cicadas with their abdomen turned into fungal plugs keep flying around as if nothing was wrong because they are swimming till their ommatidia (fancy term for insect eyes) in the hallucinogen psilocybin. They keep falling and air dropping fungal spores on their brethren. It is this that made Matt Kasson, the principal investigator of this study call these cicadas “ flying saltshakers of death”.
5. So what if I’m a bee? Make me a no fat, no sugar, milk, two pumps of caramel drizzle cappuccino to go.
Believe it or not once upon a time starbucks coffee used to come from real plants and real beans. Just kidding, it still does. and these beans come from flowers that need to be pollinated. Now the nectar in these flowers contains caffeine. If you remember from spiders, caffeine is toxic to insects, then why?
Turns out at the low doses of caffeine, like the ones found in nectar of coffee plants, bee remember and locate the flowers much better. Plus, the bees keep coming back.
But at what cost? The caffeine even in these low doses makes the bees jittery, tired and dehydrated. These bees move around their colony puking and defecating because they cannot handle the coffee.
Neither can they handle their caffeine nor can they easily give it up. But I think you and I can understand. Afterall, Its not easy to kick one’s coffee habit. bees sipping on coffee. While this was fun. Addiction is a series disease that destroys lives. Lab experimentation is important to understand it. Hence so is making model organisms. If you and anyone close to you is suffering from addiction please try to get professional help to recover from it.
Thank you for enjoying this article this far. Hate it? Love it? Please let me know, any feedback helps me grow. I would greatly appreciate if you could share this or comment on this.
References
Nathanson, J. A. (1984). “Caffeine and related methylxanthines: possible naturally occurring pesticides”. Science. 226 (4671): 184–7. doi: 10.1126/science.6207592. PMID 6207592.
Noever, R., J. Cronise, and R. A. Relwani. 1995. Using spider-web patterns to determine toxicity. NASA Tech Briefs 19(4):82. Published in New Scientist magazine, 29 April 1995
Entler, Brian V., J. Timothy Cannon, and Marc A. Seid. “Morphine addiction in ants: a new model for self-administration and neurochemical analysis.” Journal of Experimental Biology 219.18 (2016): 2865–2869.
Kaun, Karla R., Anita V. Devineni, and Ulrike Heberlein. “Drosophila melanogaster as a model to study drug addiction.” Human genetics 131.6 (2012): 959–975.
Cooley, John R., David C. Marshall, and Kathy BR Hill. “A specialized fungal parasite (Massospora cicadina) hijacks the sexual signals of periodical cicadas (Hemiptera: Cicadidae: Magicicada).” Scientific reports 8.1 (2018): 1432.
Discovery of psychoactive plant and mushroom alkaloids in ancient fungal cicada pathogens. https://doi.org/10.1101/375105
Wright, G. A., et al. “Caffeine in floral nectar enhances a pollinator’s memory of reward.” Science 339.6124 (2013): 1202–1204.