The Insect With Fourteen Lives

A pinhead-sized wormlike larva of a louse may possess one of life’s ultimate secrets—an elixir of controlled growth.

The strange ways of life of hormophis hamamelidid—which goes through fourteen different life stages in the course of a year’s lifetime—are being studied by scientists in the hope of isolating a mysterious something which may open the door of some of the greatest paradoxes of biology.

The insect is an aphis which causes galls, growths comparable to animal cancers, on witch hazel leaves. These growths result when the aphis injects into the leaf by means of a microscopic apparatus like a hypodermic needle an infinitesimally minute amount of an unidentified substance. The gall grows around and over the insect. It becomes the tiny creature’s home.

The substance completely changes the nature of the plant cells. They normally would become leaf cells, highly specialized to fit into leaf growth. Now they become gall cells. Something similar happens in cancer, except that the new cell growth, having escaped from the government of the animal body, is entirely uncontrolled. The gall cells, however, still remain under some sort of control. They always form galls and they do not kill the leaf, which is necessary for their existence.

Marvelous is the life story of the aphis itself. The sequence starts with a “stem mother”, a newly hatched female. She injects the substance into the leaf and the house builds itself around her. Inside this house she passes through four stages. Her structure changes completely four times. That is, she becomes in a sense four different animals, one after another. In the fourth stage she gives birth to from fifty to a hundred living young.

Each of these young, in turn, goes through four stages. In the last of these they have wings. The winged insects crawl out through a hole in the bottom of the gall. Each produces from ten to twenty young on the bottom of the leaf. Each of the young, in turn, goes through five stages. During the last they are both males and females. This is the only time the male makes its appearance in the life cycle. All the other births are by parthogenesis.

Each of the females lays eggs in the winter on the witch hazel. The buds are destined to become leaves in the early Spring. The eggs hatch a few days before the leaves appear. Each of the newly hatched aphids—all females—injects some of the house-building material into the leaf upon which she finds herself. She becomes a new “stem mother” and the strange process starts all over again.

The rapid reproduction rate might well be overwhelming to the witch hazels, and consequently suicidal for the insects, except for certain enemies which keep down the numbers of the “lice”. Such tiny forms of life as larval lacewings are able to crawl through the hole in the bottom of the gall and feed on the occupants during their various stages.

University of Virginia biologists who have been giving particular attention to the aphis are interested primarily in the substance injected into the leaves. It must be one of the most potent growth factors in nature. The amount any one aphid is able to inject is indescribably minute, even though some of them make as many as 50 separate injections. The material causes the leaf cells to become larger and to multiply much more rapidly until a “house” many times the size of the aphis is complete in a few days. The structure is perfect, even including a “picket fence” of tiny hairs around its base to keep out invaders.

The substance exists in such minute amounts that thus far it has been impossible to isolate it in anything approaching a pure form. The Virginia biologists have set themselves a task requiring infinite patience over many years—tracing the increase of the amount in the salivary glands of each individual through each of its fourteen lives, and also through the eggs with which the strange life cycle starts.

The present clues indicate that the substance is a filterable virus—tiniest of living things compared with which the pinhead-sized aphis is like a whale compared to a fly.