basically, the idea i had was darwin wasps, but unfertilized eggs become hives that also serve the purpose of producing and fertilizing eggs. one of the two predominant sexes of these wasps is replaced by a parasitic mound of flesh that intertwines itself into whatever it is parasitizing that can be used to produce more eggs to be injected into other organisms. the hive uses /meat/ chuubanite to keep the host alive and capable of fending for itself for the most part, and produces a strong, bitter/spicy scent (and flavor) that is supposed to keep predators away, mark its territory, and inform other wasps of the location of the hive. it also has the slight ability to make its host more susceptible to suggestion, but this effect does not always work, and can be undone with the use of certain medicines, making it unreliable.
the main advantage of a moving hive is that it can be used to gather resources passively, as the eggs that the hive produces can be a source of food for the wasps if they lack the resources necessary to survive, with the host itself as another option if that should fail, but also because the wasps can access more environments to "invade". the wasps are highly territorial against other wasps and will fight to the death to kill enemy wasps and their hives, but the wasps will be passive against most other organisms as long as they don't threaten the hive, since they could make for a potential new hive. this conditional passivity applies to the host itself.
if the host is not made more susceptible to suggestion by the hive and goes on to threaten the hive in any noticeable way, or alternatively if the host dies, the wasps will eat the host and start anew. this leads to a more r selected reproductive strategy. if the host, or nearby organisms do not appear to be a threat to the hive, the wasps will go about their business as usual. regardless of whether or not the host is under its influence, it will still feel pain from having a bunch of wasps crawling around in it as the hive slowly burrows itself deeper into its insides to maintain its production of more eggs, but it might be better at ignoring and living with that pain as a result of the increased suggestibility.
a particularly strong willed /meat/head could make use of this by intentionally infecting themselves and entering enemy territory, as the wasps will protect the host from things that threaten the hive. the scent of the hive can also be used to reduce hostility to the hive at the cost of making other wasps go completely irate, but this won't stop the hive from defending itself. another way of making use of the wasps is to smoke out the hive and transport it in enemy territory, but this is less reliable and has a higher likelihood of either backfiring or failing due to the wasps being incapable of defensing themselves until they are back to normal conditions. the wasps retain any natural weaknesses that wasps have, including a weakness to smoke or gas-based weapons, but they also can't reproduce without a hive, which requires a host to live.
So what animals do these wasps infect? Humans are obvious but what about others? Can the nests survive under water or direct sunlight? Wasps are known to die from heat.
we already have a few animals described in our rentry, but basically, any animal that is of a good enough size to be a hive, though some will be better hosts than others. i'm thinking anything larger than a guineapig is a good option, but i'll have to wait for others to see if i want to change or scrap any aspect, or the entirety of this idea.
I was thinking some cold-blooded lizards could work. Either that or monkeys. Sure it'd leave the monkey an outcast of its tribe but the monkey would have a defense against predators. Hell you might even get a troop of wasp monkeys that prefer being infected.
i was thinking of lizards, too, but i wanted to use words that 1) could be generalized and 2) were directly linked to animals we knew existed in our ecosystem. monkeys is natural if apes and humans are an option. now i'm imagining that one guy who posts monkeys getting tortured getting killed by one of these things when he tries to get them to infect one of the monkeys.
So why not have a symbiotic species with monkeys and wasps? Monkeys would be smart enough they they will know how to keep wasps cool during the summer. Also the wasps will sting predators trying to eat monkeys, including chimps. Though the wasps probably won't do much damage against lizards and crocodiles.
because the wasps would want to nest in the monkeys. the thing about the infestation of this species is that if it creates a hive, it technically is symbiotic instead of parasitic because it produces a kind of mutual benefit solely from the fact that it makes the interests of the hive the same as the interests of it's host, the problem is, why limit this only to monkeys when they could do it to any other species, as well?
I just chose monkeys as an intelligent animal. Most other animals would instinctivley fight off the infection if it causes then pain. Even to the point of biting off infected limbs. Monkeys or apes should be smart enough to learn to live with the pain if it means protection from predators. It can even be learned from parent to offspring from generation to generation. And yes this includes humans too.
the whole point of having the hive make the host more susceptible to suggestion was that it would address that tendency to respond to the pain. if it was reliant on it's host being smart enough to recognize it as an advantage, it wouldn't survive, even if the host were smart enough to recognize it as a benefit.
The toughness of the skin is probably more important than the size of the creature. Human have really soft skins compared to a lot of the animal kingdom, which would restrict things a lot for the wasps.
this is true, and another reason why i was questioning whether or not to mention lizards specifically, but that could be solved in a variety of ways, so i wanted to wait for a more comprehensive response.
This isn't true. Symbiotic relationships in real life are often really, really specific, not super generalized. So long as the wasp found even one species which understood it was beneficial, both species could theoretically flourish. In fact I think you may in fact be making it a wee bit overpowered if you're also giving it brainwashing powers. What is this wasp's natural predator? How has it not completely taken over its local ecosystem?
didn't i address most, if not all of that in >>27148099? it's parasitic, first and foremost. the symbiotic effect is purely the result of it defending it's hive, which happens to be the host. while there is a bit of mutual benefit, it's clear the wasps benefit most from, and hold all the leverage in the interaction. it doesn't have brainwashing powers, it basically makes the host follow it's normal routines and behaviors, ignoring the pain that comes from being a hive.
it's weaknesses as wasps are the same as before, stuff like birds and what not are probably common predators of them, and these wasps attack other wasps to an irrational degree. furthermore, i said that smoke and gas-based weapons are effective against them. the reason i mentioned gas-based weapons specifically was because /meat/ doesn't use guns since they are unreliable and can damage goods, they use gas-based weapons instead, and we both know /meat/ can find a lot of uses for wasps, i even mentioned the taste of the flesh of the host for that reason. finally, any predator of the host that can handle the wasps trying to defend it pose a great threat to the wasp's survival, although if they can manage to infest the predator, it would be a minor setback.
How has it not completely taken over its local ecosystem?
ok, this one is a better question. despite the fact that i apparently didn't make them obvious enough for you, i added a lot of disadvantages with the goal of preventing this species from doing just that, but it's not because of anything i did to make them harder to deal with. if anything, lacking a consistent hive that they can return to is a bit of a disadvantage, but it is offset by the advantages mentioned in the second paragraph.
the thing i was basing them off of, darwin wasps, are known to take over ecosystems. if you want to know what effect they would likely have on the ecosystem, i suggest looking to their real-world counterpart. with that being said, yet another disadvantage that looks like an advantage, the fact that they can use /meat/ chuubanite to keep the hive alive, would limit them to /meat/ and nearby areas.
the way i imagine it is that the host might get the advantage of being infested by wasps that will defend it, but that would never offset the disadvantage of being infested by wasps unless they were both really smart, and really strong willed. even then, it would only be a benefit for as long as it was being used to defend the host, which is why /meat/heads would probably remove it as soon as they didn't need it anymore though i would imagine /meat/ would also enjoy the pain, so maybe they wouldn't do it too soon. it is only technically symbiotic, and solely as a result of the intertwining of the hive's interests with that of the hosts.
if it is used intentionally, it is very rare, i just thought it would be cool if it was possible. if you still don't like it, or think it's overpowered, i can find more ways to balance it, but i was somewhat proud of the fact that most of the advantages are disadvantages in disguise.
You keep calling your wasps parasitic but the only real downside I see to these things is the excruciating pain they cause. They don't kill the host, they don't steal resources off the host, and they're an added, completely automated defense system for the host. They even serve to make the host unappealing to potential predators. What predator is going out of its way to essentially fight off two animals at once (the host and the hive) when the only reward is a foul-tasting meal? Even when it's not an absolute pain to go after, many predators will completely avoid bad-tasting prey. You see many species of animals in real life who have taken advantage of this as their main survival strategy, such as the case with viceroy butterflies. Viceroy butterflies taste good, but they've evolved to look like monarch butterflies, which taste absolutely foul. As a result, most bird ignore them entirely unless they're absolutely desperate. I suspect you'd wind up with a similar phenomenon in regard to animals hosting these wasps - predators would learn they taste bad, and would then not care to go through the hassle of hunting them. The host has gained nature's equivalent of a notice-me-not field.
The only real drawback, the pain, is mitigated by the brainwashing (yes, I think most people would consider "ignore the excruciating pain you're in" brainwashing, albeit a very mild form of it). The only time the hive actually becomes a problem for the host is if the host tries to remove it. Aggression against other wasps is not a drawback unless these wasps of yours are abnormally weak. Otherwise, these things probably fucking obliterate other wasps and may have become the only wasps in their native biome. Hyper-aggression is a valid survival strategy. As for them still having a normal wasp's weaknesses...I don't know about that.Those are heavily mitigated by the existence of the host. Smaller animals like rabbits may not be able to deter a wasp's natural predators, but would a bird divebomb a monkey or wild boar just to get at these wasps, when they can eat other, easier prey? I have my doubts. While smoke and gas are, of course, effective against wasps...this is only in regards to its weakness vs humans. What's its weakness in its natural habitat? I'm really having a hard time imagining an ecosystem this wasp doesn't just bulldoze over.
i'm starting to realize that i failed to properly describe a whole bunch of stuff that was going on in my mind. i thought i clarified it, and i can point to places in my description of them that i would have thought would make it obvious, but apparently nobody else is getting it.
so first of all, please read this line.
regardless of whether or not the host is under its influence, it will still feel pain from having a bunch of wasps crawling around in it as the hive slowly burrows itself deeper into its insides to maintain its production of more eggs
now, maybe i should have clarified it a bit more, but when i said burrow, i am imagining the kinds of things that i would get banned for posting here. fun fact, in the editing stage, i used the word "eating" but figured that wasn't descriptive enough of what was happening. i guess that was a mistake. it isn't painful just because, and as i have said multiple times before, it is only technically symbiotic, as in it provides one slight advantage to counter the massive disadvantage that comes with being infested. i said they had to have a more r selected reproductive strategy, looking at the context, you should see that i was referring to the hive's survivability. a normal hive doesn't have the risk of dying the bigger the hive gets. i added a whole paragraph specifically to explain why the wasps would still be able to survive despite this disadvantage because i thought it was too harmful to their survival.
second, darwin wasps often give their hosts aids. when i wrote the description, i removed a line comparing the suggestibility to behavioral aids because i figured it would be obvious, but they use aids to cause the immune system to ignore the eggs in the same way the hive makes the host ignore the wasps.
third, when i said agression against other wasps, i was thinking that, since other wasps might take their potential hosts, they would want to reduce the number of wasps that weren't from their hive. not their species. they are not the predators of other wasps, they are the predators of their own kin and relatives as soon as they stop being part of the same host. if anything, other species of wasps would be less threatening if they don't take away potential hosts.
27158225
my main problem is that i came up with the idea of it parasitizing humans after coming up with the idea in general. i said the guy who mentioned nurgle was an inspiration for it, but i had the idea long before. it was when i realized how it could apply to humans that i got interested in writing about it here, hence why i felt like i had to go into more detail about it than the stuff i said before.
i'm pretty sure brainwashing involves a specific process. otherwise, spiking someone's drink would be considered brainwashing. now that i think of it, "succeptible to suggestion" implies making someone do something they wouldn't have otherwise done if it were suggested to them.
i am imagining that depressive, almost empty feeling you get when you just sort of live without any enthusiasm, where you just sort of do stuff because it's what you usually do, and if things exist that prevent you from doing it, you just sort of push through and ignore it because you can't be arsed to respond to anything outside of autopilot. i don't know how to describe this, which might be why there is so much confusion over it, but i wouldn't imagine it being all that complex, even if i didn't specifically say that it was unreliable, or that the wasps only kill the host if it does anything to threaten it. with that said, i figure if i tried i could think of a way to make it more reliable at the cost of increased complexity, such that it actually could be a mild form of brainwashing, but i'll leave that for later.
As for them still having a normal wasp's weaknesses
the host is a hive, not a mecha. the wasps can't rely on it to be self-sufficient, they need to exit the hive and gather resources like all other species. also, wasps and bees change their behavior depending on whether or not they have a hive to return to. i said unfertilized eggs turn into hives which can fertilize eggs, implying they need to be in need of a hive to bear a new hive. for the most part, they are not protected by a hive.
if we applied this standard to normal wasps, then they would have fewer predators because wasps can protect themselves from some predators by going inside the hive. while it's true that the hive has it's own prey, it also has it's own predators, and as i have been trying to emphasize for so long, the host isn't just fine and dandy after the parasitic wasps parasitize them, the host is less even with the automated defense system, but the wasps are more because paragraph 2.
What's its weakness in its natural habitat?
this isn't a serious problem for me, but it's a pet peeve of mine that people keep acting like the way man effects things shouldn't be considered because humans are supposedly unnatural or something. the only difference between us and any other species is the degree of our ability to intentionally change our surroundings, but every other species can change the ecosystem dramatically, sometimes in intentional ways, sometimes with rudimentary technology that, again, only differs from our technology in degree and not method. even the pace of advancement is beat by other species, so pretending that the way we change things doesn't count for any reason seems flawed to me. /meat/ would have a noticeable effect on its population, especially because it would likely kill its hive if it left /meat/'s territory.
nature's equivalent of a notice-me-not field
i suppose i didn't mention that the hosts get aids before, but wasps can't defend them against bacteria, viruses, and other microscopic predators, so that is worth mentioning. with that said, the more i think about what you said, the more i realize that you are accidentally making a good point. your main point is completely wrong, the hosts are obviously infested, even if there are no wasps to defend it, so unless predators stop hunting their prey if they encounter too many rotten corpses of their prey that taste bad, they won't evolve to avoid the prey.
they would evolve to avoid the wasps. part of that was the intention of the scent, since i figured the hive would be too weak if they didn't have it, but if the mere presence of the wasps can deter predators, that could make the scent unnecessary, though i still think the hive itself should have that flavor. with this said, i would imagine the number of predators that would ignore or fail to notice the wasps is higher than the number of predators that would ignore or fail to notice the scent, so your desire to give it more predators can be satisfied with that simple change.
hopefully i am not overcompensating, but if you think it is still too powerful then i really have no idea why. again, the way i'm imagining it makes it extremely weak, and even if it is powerful, keep in mind that i said it was only in /meat/, and that /meat/ chuubanite's effects on evolution would give the place a lot of biodiversity, which would make everything there more dangerous. hopefully me and the other /meat/heads or anyone else that wants to throw a suggestion our way, wink wink can come up with a bunch of species, though i doubt we will add enough to cover an entire ecosystem, especially since it might start getting more complicated than it's worth at some point, but hopefully we can make an in-depth ecosystem to work off of.
Oops, in hindsight I missed some obvious points. It's for the best we didn't continue this conversation last night. You're right that I should have noticed the wasps already slowly eat out the host's insides as the nest grows. But, again, given the host doesn't die, I'm not sure this is a disadvantage. Of course form a human perspective, "oh god I'm slowly dying because my insides are gradually being scooped out" is a terrible, terrible thing. From an evolutionary perspective, however? Not so much. When luna moths emerge from their cocoons, they no longer have mouths. They die slow, painful deaths over the course of one week, but evolution did not particularly care to correct this. As long as the creature reproduces before it dies, as far as nature is concerned, that's a grand success. These wasps' hosts would presumably still have enough time to reproduce, since I assume the wasps are smart enough to avoid vital organs for as long as possible for the sake of the hive's survival. But with your clarification on the wasps essentially just giving their hosts existential depression, I think this is neatly solved. The host probably just loses all mating drive.
wasps attack their own
Ah, alright, this point wasn't clear. Yes, this is fine as a drawback then, the wasps would naturally curb their own population.
the wasps need to exit the hive to gather resources like all other species
They need to exit the hive, but because the host continues to behave as normal, they would never have to travel very far. Normal nesting wasps/bees (of which parasitoid wasps are not, though I assume you know this) also prefer to stay as close to their nest as possible when hunting for food. They only begin to range further when the hive grows too large, consuming all nearby resources. The "hive" for these wasps move, eliminating that problem. But even if that weren't the case, the biggest threat to a wasp/bee hive's survival is not predation against gatherers. It's attacks directly to their nest by creatures like mice, honey badgers and bears which eat the larvae. I suspect this is the point you were trying to make about the wasps having their own predators, but most creatures that prey on wasp nests are quite small and would be offput by the "hive" being a living creature with the potential to fight back. Very large predators like bears won't give a shit if the "hive" is now an animal, but the medium sized and smaller ones, which make up the bulk of a wasps natural predators would be less likely to attack your wasps' nests vs a regular wasp's nest.
humans shouldn't be considered unnatural
Ah, I realize I'm the one who failed to extrapolate my thoughts here due to my assumption that people are autistic about the same things as me. Of course humans are considered a part of the environment and will affect the biome they live in, but you still have to consider what the biome looks like without humans because humans are an incredibly young species. If we're very generous with what we consider human, humans have been around for about 3 million years. Wasps have been around for 240 million. /meat/'s biome would have been shaped by these wasps long before humans came into the picture.
predators would evolve to avoid the wasps
Yes, this is the point I was making. There's no disagreement here. I did not mean predators would evolve a host animals entire species, or I would have said as much. I meant that predators would evolve to specifically avoid "hosts of the parasitic wasps," which is enough of an evolutionary advantage that some animals are very likely to allow the wasps to nest in them willingly, forming a symbiotic relationship. Of course, this has already been solved with the lack of mating drive -- the hosts are now decidedly parasitic. Given the additional clarification that your wasps attack their own, there is also no concern about ecological domination. I now think your wasps are fine. Good work on these guys.
i said they kept the host alive with /meat/ chuubanite, but the host is basically dying a slow painful death. anyways, if it's satisfactory to you at this stage, i suppose i can add it to the anchor. with that said, i'm not sure if there is any part you want me to change or emphasize. i suppose archiveanon will include the whole conversation anyways. thank you for responding to me and helping me articulate the idea better, though. also, thanks for informing me that you were going, that was much more convenient for me.