How a mind-control virus turns caterpillars into exploding 'zombies'

As if caterpillars didn’t have it hard enough.

Already the insect equivalent of an ugly duckling, caterpillars are also the potential victims of a “zombie” virus that causes them to explode in one of the most horrifying deaths in the animal kingdom.

Chris Miller, a researcher at the Wildlife Trust in Lancashire, England, was doing a butterfly survey when he spotted a dead caterpillar hanging from a leaf, in “an inverted U.”

That’s unusual, Miller said, because a caterpillar is a delicacy for birds in the area. Climbing onto a leaf in the middle of the day is like offering yourself up as lunch. And even in its long-dead state, the insect didn’t look quite right.

“It had started to go a bit mushy, is probably the nicest way of putting it,” Miller said.

Why would a caterpillar go against every survival instinct it had evolved over millennia and march out onto a leaf, in plain sight of predators?

It turns out the caterpillar didn’t have much say in the matter.

A type of virus had taken over the insect and turned it into a single-minded virus-spreading vessel.

The baculovirus halts a caterpillar’s moulting activity, encouraging it to keep eating and get bigger, which creates more of the virus. When the caterpillar is sufficiently massive, the virus alters its climbing activity, forcing it up high onto a leaf.

Right before the caterpillar dies, the virus releases an enzyme that liquefies the insect’s tissue. If the caterpillar is lucky it will be plucked off the leaf by a bird and, if not, its liquid-insides explode, raining down on the other caterpillars and branches below.

If those caterpillars consume the virus, the whole process starts over again...

http://nationalpost.com/news/world/how-a-mind-control-virus-causes-zombie-caterpillars-to-explode/wcm/5bd946da-04ed-45b4-8559-e7a200e48f1d

U.S. Asks Journals to Censor Articles on Bird Flu Virus

For the first time ever, a government advisory board is asking scientific journals not to publish details of certain biomedical experiments, for fear that the information could be used by terrorists to create deadly viruses and touch off epidemics.

In the experiments, conducted in the United States and the Netherlands, scientists created a highly transmissible form of a deadly flu virus that does not normally spread from person to person. It was an ominous step, because easy transmission can lead the virus to spread all over the world. The work was done in ferrets, which are considered a good model for predicting what flu viruses will do in people.

The virus, A(H5N1), causes bird flu, which rarely infects people but has an extraordinarily high death rate when it does. Since the virus was first detected in 1997, about 600 people have contracted it, and more than half have died. Nearly all have caught it from birds, and most cases have been in Asia. Scientists have watched the virus, worrying that if it developed the ability to spread easily from person to person, it could create one of the deadliest pandemics ever.

via nytimes.com