Page of Swords

On the Page of Swords a young person stands on a windy hill holding a sword upright with both hands, looking over one shoulder. Clouds race behind, and birds scatter. The Page is the curious one, the scout, the messenger, the kid who notices everything and sometimes tells.

The ichneumonoid wasps, the Darwin wasps and their cousins the braconids, are the suit's scouts. Their work is finding the young of other insects. The Darwin wasps, with very few exceptions, attack the young of insects that go through complete metamorphosis, and spiders, and in the end they kill their hosts. That makes them important regulators of insect populations. Their tool is the ovipositor, a fine filament the female uses to probe, pierce, and lay. It's metal-hardened: in many wasps the ovipositor's cuticle holds up to ten percent zinc or manganese by weight, and in the ichneumonoids the metal is manganese.

Some carry something stranger: a virus. These polydnaviruses are written into the wasp's own chromosomes and pass from one generation to the next. When the wasp lays her egg, she injects virus particles too, and they deliver genes into the host that help the wasp's young survive inside it.

Here's the riddle. The Page is a messenger, and this one carries a letter written in the language of genes. Its sword is a metal pen. When the scout finds its host, it doesn't just lay an egg. It delivers a message that rewrites the reader.

When the Page appears, you're in a season of scouting. Look around, ask questions, and learn the lay of the land. But be careful what messages you deliver, and what you write into other people when you probe. Curiosity is the Page's gift. Gossip is its shadow.