Originally published at: New parasite wasp species discovered inside of adult fruit flies - Boing Boing
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Neat! But not quite horrifying enough. The videos I found from the links all looked to be unsuccessful attempts at parasitizing the fly, but this science.org writeup has a successful attempt.
That is one tiny wasp.
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I’m currently fighting a pantry moth invasion with a parasitoid wasp. Not sure how successful it is yet. But my daughter wants to know if we need to get a gecko to combat the wasps after the pantry moths are eradicated because she really wants a gecko.
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This has “old woman who swallowed a fly” vibes…
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They are under-studied and include the smallest insect in the world, the fairy wasp Dicopomorpha echmepterygis , which is wingless and blind and measures about 0.127mm in length.
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Yeah, but can the wasp control the brain of it’s host? Even fungi can do that.
I feel like this story actually ends up with one thousand baby praying mantises.
Well, it starts with a thousand....
My following has demanded my story about 1,000 baby praying mantises. So, here we go. About fifteen years ago, I lived in Tampa Bay. If you’ve ever been, you know it’s hot, humid, and grows bugs big enough to mug you for drug money. 1/ https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/1170128466722852876/photo/1
My, ahem, former wife and I had just moved into a larger, cheaper duplex than our apartment, only to discover the reason it was cheaper stemmed from the fact it was infested with “palmetto bugs,” which is a polite Florida euphemism for cockroaches. 2/
The trouble was, we were animal people. We had cats, a dog, and multiple reptiles as pets. Traditional extermination methods would have been lethal to one or more of our little brood. So my then wife searched out “Natural” remedies to the problem. 3/
A week later, the answer to our problem arrived in a cardboard box with screens on the sides. Within, one thousand baby praying mantises sat, waiting for their moment to go forth and murder just… everything. 4/
The instructions on the box were simple. Place it in a dark corner of the house, open it, and lay back to let the tiny green slaughter engines do their work. So, we did. They were so little at first. Easy to miss. We stepped on more than a few of them. 5/
But there were SO MANY. And they were really good at their jobs. They couldn’t take on the adult palmetto bugs at first, but they decimated the young. And they were indiscriminate. We found them in our lizard cages eating crickets meant for the frilled dragon. 6/
And they only got bigger over the next month. We’d have to sweep them off the bathroom sink and shake them off our toothbrushes in the mornings. One night, I woke from a dead sleep to an inch long green murderer on my nose, arms out, threatening to fuck me up. 7/
Every day was like watching miniature Thunder Dome shit in real time. The mantises would eat the palmetto bugs, the cats would eat the mantises, the dog would chase the cats. Just pandemonium. 8/
But eventually, there was no food left for the remaining mantis gladiators. They were two plus inches long now, had eaten everything smaller than them, and most of them had names because that’s just how we were about things. They were big enough that the cats were like, naaah. 9/
Which was when they started EATING EACHOTHER. It’s not just a weird sex fetish for mantises. They are straight up cannibals. You have never loved anything as much as a praying mantis loves murdering shit. So we threw the like four survivors outside. 10/
We were vacuuming up dead mantis husks for a month after that. But you know what we didn’t have anymore? A single palmetto bug. Not one. Our duplex was a cockroach war crime. Word. Got. Around. We lived there for two years and never saw another. 11/
And the handful of champions we released into the backyard spawned generations of mantises who kept it that way. I’m pretty sure I saw one of them eating a bird. 12/12.
Glad y’all liked this story. I also write stories down in book form. Here’s my latest. It has a transgender crab engineer and a hentai tentacle monster audiophile: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250302717
Source -
x.com
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Preying mantises can indeed catch and kill hummingbirds!
I hadn’t seen that story before, but every couple of years you see a new one make the rounds as someone discovers that their live Christmas tree also has a live mantis egg sac on it. Bring it into the warmth of the home, and…
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It’s wasps all the way down.
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This is exactly what I said to a friend who was buying some nematode worms to try and tackle a vine weevil infestation.
(Except in reverse, because each ‘solution’ is smaller than the one before)
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