IT鈥橲 a brazen deception worthy of the slickest con artist. A tiny wasp tricks a tree into feeding its larvae as if they were the tree鈥檚 own seeds.
The wasp, Megastigmus spermotrophus, lays its eggs into the cones of Douglas fir trees. It targets the structures that, when fertilised, will become seeds.
When Patrick von Aderkas at the University of Victoria, Canada, and his colleagues sealed fir cones in bags to prevent pollination, they found that the trees continued to pack nutrients into wasp-infested 鈥渟eeds鈥� as if they had been fertilised (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2005.3061). 鈥淚t鈥檚 as if the tree had a surrogate embryo,鈥� von Aderkas says.
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