Peeps
“But to tell the tale, first you get to hear about mealworms, a kind of insect that’s just as unpleasant as its name. Mealworms aren’t very big—a cluster of thousands looks like a tiny white speck. But this single speck can devastate whole continents. Here’s how: The average mealworm has eight hundred kids, almost all of which are female. Each of these offspring can have eight hundred more kids. Do the math: One mealworm can produce five hundred million great-grandchildren. And they aren’t really worms at all; the young ones can fly, carried from plant to plant on the wind, spreading infection as they go.
Thirty years ago, a species of mealworm rampaged through Africa, attacking a staple crop called cassava and almost starving twenty million people. That’s a pretty big death toll for a microscopic parasite. Fortunately, however, cassava mealworms have their own parasite, a species of wasp from South America.
A word about parasitic wasps: nasty.
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