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itzamahel — Megarhyssa macrurus Ichneumon
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Published: 2017-04-28 15:43:28 +0000 UTC; Views: 1553; Favourites: 7; Downloads: 0
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"I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars"Charles Darwin, in a letter to the American naturalist Asa Gray, in 1860
The Megarhyssa macrurus is a species of parasitoid wasps from the ichneumonidae family. The peculiar structure found at the ichneumon wasp's abdomen is not exactly a sting, but and ovipositor. Like a sting, it can pierce other invertebrates and even several layers of organic material (including wood, where eggs or larvae from other insects are stored), and also inject venomous, paralyzing substances. Most ichneumonid species inject their eggs directly into their host's body or on its surface. After hatching, the ichneumonid larva eats its host alive.
Ichneumonids can either paralyze their host and prevent it from growing while it is eaten (Idibiosis) or let their host grow and develop while they feed on it (Koinobiosis). In both cases, the host dies after some weeks, after which the ichneumonid larva emerges and pupates. The name of the family derives from the greek ἰχνεύμων ("tracker"), and first appeared in "History of the Animals", by Aristotle, from around 343 B.c.
The apparent cruelty of the ichneumonids troubled philosophers, naturalists, and theologians in the 19th century, who found the parasitoid life style inconsistent with the notion of a world created by a loving and benevolent God. Charles Darwin found the example of the Ichneumonidae so troubling that it contributed to his increasing doubts about the nature and existence of a Creator or a conscious, benevolent force behind "nature".
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This is the fourth of a series of illustrations featuring arthropods. I've also produced stickers of this series for trade in Brazil.
The first reason I had to depict these arthropods is the promotion of the rights of sentient animals (animals who are capable to feel and experience negative or positive experiences, and whose organic structure is complex enough to allow a considerable level of self-consciousness). That is, the right to avoid suffering (either caused by humans or not) and to live their lives in peace.
Nature surely isn't all bliss for human and non-human sentient animals alike. To take in consideration the wills of the sentient animals in living and avoiding pain means to challenge not only how human society is organized - including the systematic exploitation imposed over exploted animals, either hunt down, poisoned, assassinated or forced to breed under torture and poor conditions, in order to produce meat, eggs, milk, and an array of other products - but also several aspects of what most people superficially consider "nature" or "the environment".
Exterminations of a wide variety of animals are often sponsored by organizations claiming to defend an environmental interest (like "controlling the population of a species"), but instead of granting these animals better conditions in life and even to avoid overpopulation through less painful measures (like sterilization), these organizations rather invest on massacres, electrocutions or poisoning of these populations for economical interests (associating themselves with professional hunters and local government).
Read more about the conflict between sentience animal ethics and the speciesist environmental ethics at this section of articles by Animal Ethics
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Comments: 3
"The peculiar structure found at the ichneumon wasp's abdomen is not exactly a sting, but an ovipositor"... Just a quick correction. The female Ichneumon Wasp can in fact sting with their ovipositor, and their stingers do contain venom. However, it is very unlikely to be stung, especially by those with longer ovipositors. Also stingers and ovipositors are homologous, so they are really the same thing, but due to the fact that not all insects use the ovipositor as a weapon, professionals will often avoid using the term "stinger".
Anyway nice drawing. I love the anatomy presented here.
I also agree with your message on Animal Ethics. Our treatment of domestic animals needs improvement. I want all of our fellow human beings to be properly fed and protected from famine, but not if means subjecting animals to suffering for personal or economic gain. I come from a family that once practiced Lithuanian Paganism (Romuva), which places great value on nature, and it was customary during hunts to kill an animal painlessly, and without it's notice, meaning that the animal could never be permitted to see it's death coming, because you would be subjecting it to feelings of fear from just your sight alone, which was enough to make it considered an inhumane kill. I left the Romuvan faith for Roman Catholicism in my younger years, and then in my adult years, I became an Agnostic/Deist, but the messages taught in my past were still to this day very inspiring.
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Thanks for your observations! You're right, indeed ichneumon wasps' "stingers" are homologous to ovipositors - I tried to express how it's different from a common bee's "stinger" according to it's use, but it didn't sound clear.
About animal ethics, it's really interesting to see the point of view of the Romuva in respect to nature. This pursuit of making death 'as humane as possible' during hunts also exists in the belief of other cultures, including some indigenous peoples from Brazil (where I come from). I also understand that given a series of conditions, it's hard for some populations, especially those usually attached (or formerly attached) to semi-nomadic ways of life, to prevent famine just keeping a plant-based diet, because of the difficulty in creating proper variety and abundance of vegetables in some seasons. I believe some permacultural practices such as agroforestry and urban agriculture, allied to radical economic changes, can help alleviate that matter.
Understandably, human overpopulation, sedentarization, over-consumerism and the growth of urban centers has enhanced the alienation most people have in relation to the animals that end up exploited and killed for their feeding - and this is what first got me thinking, a decade ago, about the way we treat non-human animals and if there's even a need for keeping that practice of breeding for slaughter (in the general context). I've been (and still am) an atheist since an early age, but my family comes from a Roman Catholic background. I've only started to care about animal suffering as a teenager, in a moment my relatives were initially opposed to my decision of going vegan. After some years, some people close to me that used to oppose this decision also stopped or reduced consumption of some animal products. I'm still not optimistic about the growth of intensive animal farming, the fishing industry and the overall production and consumption of animals in an industrial scale, and I also don't think the advocacy of veganism alone can make a change to most animals, but I consider it a way of reducing some of the damage that's being caused.
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Romuva is very close to nature. It involved the worship of many nature gods like Perkūnas (God of Mountains, Sky, and Thunder), Žvorūna (Goddess of Forests, Animals, and Trees), and Dievas (Supreme God of the Earth). What I think is quite unique about Romuva, is that it is the only European religion I'm aware of that seems to portray non-humans as having the same value as humans in mythology. Some of the most powerful deities of the religion are not represented as human at all. Žvorūna is depicted as a giant wolf leading a pack (Žvorūna literally means "She-Beast"). Perkūnas is sometimes depicted as a great oak tree that can take on human form (Perkūnas literally means "Oak Father"). The religion slowly faded away when Lithuania became Christianized in the late 14th Century, and fell apart almost completely due to the opposition of Paganism by the members of the Inquisition Movement in the 16th Century. The religion was revived during the Neopagan Movement in the 19th to 21st Century, but much of it was suppressed until the 1990s, due to the occupation under the Soviet Union.
Veganism I think is a respectful and noble decision. However I think it is really more of a subjective personal benefit, rather than an objective global benefit. It is unrealistic to expect a collaborative effort of 7 billion people to take part in it, especially in the Third World where food is a scarcity. A lot animal rights activists tend to denounce people for killing other animals for food, as if changing people's diet is very simple, but they seem to forget the fact that some people in the developing world rely on these animals for their own survival, and there really shouldn't be any double standard where one species lives takes precedence over that of the other. I know what kind of consequences can occur when animals are stripped away from a developing country's food supply. Under the Soviet Union, a lot of Lithuanian livestock was taken away for the benefit of Russian Communes, and my family for most of their lives survived off of nothing but wheat and cabbage. This lack of food variety left many people malnourished, and forced my parents to escape the country. In the case of Soviet occupied Ukraine in the 1930s, it was at its worst, with many people suffering from a disease called Kwashiorkor, which is caused by protein deficiency, and is characterized by symptoms of Edema, especially around the stomach. Eastern Europe does not have many alternative protein sources that people of the Western World have easy access to (like nuts, beans, and legumes). The atrocities in Ukraine led to a catastrophic genocide known as "Holodomor", which killed 7-12 million people.
I also fear that many domestic animals would not be suited for life in the wild, due to centuries of selective breeding and gene alteration, which can lead to their extinction. The opposite can also occur, in which a newly introduced species could end up thriving, but at the expense of others. This happened in Australia, when domesticated rabbits were introduced to the population in the 18th Century for food. Some were released to the wild when Australia began to shift away from Rabbit livestock, and what followed was an ecological disaster. The rabbits began to overpopulate, destroying crops, and endangering indigenous species.
I think what is needed are legal reforms of our current Animal Ethics Laws. Their needs to be limitations towards production and distribution of animal based products, and state supervision of animal treatment. Greedy human beings should also make an effort to use their surplus of resources to help the needy, instead of shipping it to McDonalds, so fatasses can continue to overindulge on crap they don't need. Perhaps in the future we will be able to create a crop surplus that could supply the world's needs, and maybe reform social norms, eliminating the need to rely on other animals for food. Maybe we will learn to manufacture food from raw materials (this is actually currently being researched in the form of Bioprinting). But as of the present, these things are way beyond our reach.
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