How tiny wasps cope with being smaller than amoebas

On the opposite side of things, here are some of the largest single-celled organisms:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophyophore" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophyophore</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caulerpa" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caulerpa</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia_ventricosa" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia_ventricosa</a>

Wow: with only 7,400 neurons (compared to 340,000 for the common housefly and 850,000 for honeybees), this wasp can somehow fly, search for food, find the right places to lay its eggs, etc.<p>That ridiculously tiny neural network is one freakingly efficient computing device!

I find the implied range of cell sizes to be amazing. (Informally, it's tempting to view all microscopic biological entities as being similarly small; they're not.)<p>Here's a cool visual of relative cell sizes and scale:<p><a href="http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/" rel="nofollow">http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/</a>

What are the major technical barriers before we can identify the input and output channels to this insect's brain and start iterating through all possible input values, recording the corresponding output values? And once we can do that, could we use that data to fly a virtual insect around a virtual world?

So, this is really just an allegory about Minimum Viable Products, right?

The headline is a bit misleading, though. Amoebas seem to be just used as a reference point, where I kept expecting more salience - some adaptation of the wasp to deal specifically with the fact that it was smaller than an amoeba in particular, rather than just with the fact that it was small. Nevertheless, confusion aside, it's fascinating stuff!

The wings are amazing. I'd really like to see a video of one of these in flight, although I imagine that would be a difficult thing to capture.

this is rather cool but just to nitpick "one single cell" does not always imply "small" there are a few which are visible to the naked eye (think eggs)

Does anyone know how the nucleus destruction happens? Is there any analogy to regularization/sparsification in machine learning? Is there some kind of process that destroys the nucleus of the least useful neurons?

Wow, these little guys are incredible! I had no idea such complexity could evolve at that scale. I think these species deserve a mention in science classrooms.

Is that wasp truly really small? Or is that amoeba just really big?