Last weekend was the annual James Dean Memorial Carshow in Fairmount, Indiana, commemerating the death of the original rebel and movie prettyboy. Fairmount (or "the birthplace of cool", as the town watertower proclaims) is the birthplace of both James Dean and Jim Davis, so I think the cool gets somewhat canceled out, and if that doesn't do it then the current white-trash hicksville status of the town should suffice.
In any case, my uncle was in Elwood for said carshow with his '65 GTO, so my mom decided to drive up and visit him. And, seeing as it IS getting to the end of summer and there were funnel-cakes and snow-cones a-pleanty at the show, the yellowjackets were visiting in record numbers as well. This fact really wasn't a big deal until my mom set her feet down in the aluminum foil that had previously contained her BBQ sandwich, and suddenly started giving a loud and lengthy demonstration of her choicest vocabulary to my aunt and uncle, the people two cars over, and everyone else between us and the schoolhouse across the field.
As I was holding ice from my homemade cream soda against her afflicted foot while she cursed her brother for teasing her for cursing the yellowjacket, several thoughts came to mind.
Specifically, I was reminded of the seventh grade, and the fact that nudibranchs enjoy their sea anemones with vinegarette dressing.
Well, not necessarily vinegar, but at least something that has the same defusing effect on a sea anemone's nematocysts, or stinging cells. "Stinging cells" seems a bit understated though, when you consider that the capsules resemble the eggs from Alien, but instead of facehuggers they lauch out a long, barbed, hollow spear filled with all sorts of nasty toxins that bind directly to pain receptors, necrotise flesh, and even an enzyme whose sole purpose is to make sure the other poisons get spread around through the victim better (hyaluronidase, which is now used in some clinical injections to encourage absorption of the coadministered medication).
Undischarged Nematocyst
in cross-section:
The coiled harpoon is clearly seen in the center, with the toxin-secreting organelles around the edge of the cell.
In any case, a number of nudibranchs, in an effort to avoid becoming free candy for everyone in the sea, have developed means of EATING these cells after coating them in a disarming mucus, passing them through their bodies and onto tentacles on their backs, and then resetting the traps. They lack the ability to make their own stinging cells, so they steal them from anemones. Vinegar is commonly administered to jellyfish stings to disarm any undischarged nematocysts, but I don't know if nudibranchs use the same method.
A species of stinging nudibranch:
A similar example can be found in your own back yards, with the monarch butterfly. Monarch butterflies are poisonous, but not because they know how to make poison themselves. Instead they have learned to eat toxic milkweed and concentrate the cardenolides present in the plant's latex. Cardenolides are a class of compounds based off of a steroid structure but with an extra lactone ring, and they make you all kinds of sick.Toxic beetles of the Amazon Rainforest DO produce their own batrachatoxin, a blazingly powerful poison that can stop a man's heart in seconds, only to be eaten en masse by poison dart frogs, who excrete the poison as their own defense in their skin.
Another route is taken by monkeys and hedgehogs. Rather than eating poisonous bugs, they will rub themselves with the noxious emissions of millipedes and stinging ants, finding that it works wonders as a mosquito repellent.
But why go to the trouble of eating or smearing yourself with dangerous, poisonous things if you can just pretend that you do? Viceroy butterflies (though still bitter and unpleasant) aren't poisonous, but are afforded the same protection from predatory birds as Monarchs by virtue of their resemblance of the poisonous species:
The caterpillers of the hawk moth are even more impressive: their backs are camouflaged, but if that fails they roll their tails over to reveal a nasty surprise:
But some just don't feel safe unless they have some real bullets in the gun they're waving around. Some are so afraid that they live directly on a protective species, like clownfish with their anemone or remoras on a shark, but others are more independant than that. They demand that their bodyguards follow them around.
Some hermit crabs will intentionally place small sea anemones on their shells, carrying them around like fraggle-esque pigtails as they scavenge the seabed. The crabs are protected, and the anemones get the benefit of riding around with a messy eater. But my favorite example of bringing your weapons with you is the Boxer Crab, also known as the Pom-Pom Crab:
Yes, it is holding a tiny anemone in each claw, and will wave them furiously at anything that gets too close for comfort.Which brings us up to the 7th grade.
This was me:
My freckles, poor haircut, and over-full lips weren't enough: I had just gotten braces and glasses. And in choosing glasses, I subscribed to the docterine that I should be looking through the lenses regardless of the direction my eyes were pointing. The result was much like the lady fromt the Old Navy commercials.
It didn't help matters that I was also incredibly short (all the way until my sophomore year of high school, when I suddenly grew ten inches in as many months) and got straight A's.
When name-calling didn't get much of an effect, I was welcomed into a new game called "smear the queer" during our open-campus lunches (7th grade was too old for a supervised recess). The way this is played is that someone(usually but not always Jared) would throw a soda can at someone (always me), and whoever it hit was the "queer", whom everyone else kicked and punched until they got bored or lunch was over.
I wasn't much of a fan.
Fortunately, I found an unlikely savior one day at lunch in the nearby Bob Evans: A single-serving packet of grape jelly. You see, there was a large colony of burrowing yellowjackets beside the side entrance to the school...
I was free! I had an anemone in my claws! I could go wherever without fear, for there was now a cloud of yellowjackets swarming on and off of my hand as I walked.
When I saw Jared approaching with a can and his cronies in tow, I walked up to him with my hands behind my back, fluttered my hand so the wasps would take flight, then slapped him across the face.
He was a bawling mess, his friends were stunned, and I couldn't stop laughing. He ran crying into the school in search of a teacher. I tagged along trying to look concerned for a fellow classmate who'd just been stung. Of course the teacher thought the complaint of "Troy stung me with a wasp!" was absurd, especially as the accused was her best student.
I got a lot of weird stares and rumors for the rest of that year, but I was never again "smeared".
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Bonus pictures of wasp-jam reenactment:
