Now THOSE are some horns! Alex Wild of Myrmecos blog found this wasp with some serious antennae in Australia, and got it identified within 24 hours by tweeting it: Link

Previously on Neatorama: When Army Ants Attack by Alex Wild

Never forget a face? Neither do wasps! Scientists have discovered that Polistes fuscatus paper wasps can recognize and remember each other's faces with amazing accuracy.

Study co-author Michael Sheehan explains why this may be important to wasps:

The unique, distinct faces of P. fuscatus wasps, as well as the wasps' ability to recognize and remember each others' faces, are likely tied to the insects' multicolony social structure, Sheehan added.

"They have multiple queens and they all want to reproduce—they all want to be the most dominant. So being able to recognize each other helps them understand who's already beaten who, who has higher ranking in the hierarchy, and this helps to keep the peace.

"When they aren't able to recognize each other, [as] we've shown before, there was more aggression."

Link

Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has 850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the fairy wasp can fly, search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.

On top of that Polilov found that over 95 per cent of the wasps’s neurons don’t have a nucleus. The nucleus is the command centre of a cell, the structure that sits in the middle and hoards a precious cache of DNA. Without it, the neurons shouldn’t be able to replenish their vital supply of proteins. They shouldn’t work. Until now, intact neurons without a nucleus have never been described in the wild.

And yet, the fairy wasp has thousands of them. As it changes from a larva into an adult, it destroys the majority or its neural nuclei until just a few hundred are left. The rest burst apart, saving space inside the adult’s crowded head. But the wasp doesn’t seem to suffer for this loss. As an adult, it lives for around five days, which is actually longer than many other bigger wasps. As Zen Faulkes writes, “It’s possible that the adult life span is short enough that the nucleus can make all the proteins the neuron needs to function for five days during the pupal stage.”

There are other tricks tiny insects use to maintain life in miniature, which you can read at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link

Parasites are raising an army of zombie wasp queens to do their bidding, and it’s a good thing that these parasites aren’t more ambitious,  because they’d probably be well on their way to taking over the world by now!

The parasites cause common wasps to believe that they are queens, rejecting their normal caste and acting as self serving loners in wasp society:

Infected P. dominulus — better known as common European paper wasps — reject their genetically preordained roles, abandon their hives and embark on a long, macabre journey during which a few live for a time as queens, albeit murderous queens.

Read on about this fascinating example of parasitic mind control at the Wired link below, and pray these little critters don’t develop a taste for human blood!

Link

Killing ants is hard and dangerous work for wasps, so they’ve developed a rather clever method of getting rid of the pesky insect: they airdrop ‘em. Julien Grangier of the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand discovered the strange behavior:

"The first surprise was to see that despite being 200 times smaller, the ants are able to hold their own by rushing at the wasps, spraying them with acid and biting them," Grangier said. "But the most amazing was to observe that wasps, apparently frustrated by having to compete with ants, will pick them up in their mandibles, fly off and drop them away from the food."

The researchers saw the involuntary ant flights 62 times at 20 different bait stations. The wasps didn’t bother to take the ants far, usually dropping them only a few centimeters from the tuna. But that was enough. About 47 percent of the time, the discombobulated ants never made it back to the tuna. Even when the ants did make it back, the wasps beat them there 75 percent of the time.

Link

While these images may not be all that appetizing, there’s no reason to swear off figs quite yet. Those little insects are fig wasps, and they play an essential role in the fig’s life cycle as the plant’s only pollinator. That means that for pollen from one fig plant to reach another plant, fig wasps must do all the leg work. In return, the plant provides fig wasps with their only sources of food and shelter.

This arrangement is called mutualism. Both plant and wasp depend on the arrangement to survive, and without one, you wouldn’t have the other.

But what happens when it’s time to harvest the figs? Are the wasps still inside? Do the food companies scrape them out before they turn figs into jam? Or were the 12-year-olds right all along — are we really eating a mouthful of sweet baby wasp paste?

How Stuff Works lays out the entire story. Link -via Holy Kaw!

(Image credit: Flickr user Xerones)

Every week, Christie Lynn of Observation of a Nerd blog features a post about a hair raising parasite worthy of a science fiction (or perhaps better yet, horror) movie.

This particular one is about a caterpillar being eaten from inside after being infected with a parasitic wasp; make sure to see all of the other entries. And a little warning: it’s not for the faint of heart.

Cotesia glomerata, like many other parasitic wasps, targets caterpillars to host its hungry little wasps-to-be. When it finds a suitable host, it injects its eggs directly into the body cavity of the unfortunate butterfly larvae by stabbing its egg-laying, needle-like appendage called an “ovipositor” directly through the catterpillar’s skin. Inside the host, the eggs hatch and begin feeding on the inner organs to become fully grown.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Christophe.

Link - via harpers

From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by Minnesotastan.