Hello and welcome to your Frequent Fun Fact From Flora

Today we are going back to the bug world. This might happen a couple of times because I spent an AWESOME couple of hours yesterday chatting with a man who specialises in the Hymenoptera — ya bees, wasps and ants.

And you know how I feel about ants.

His name is Jonathan Green (sadly not the award winning author) and he is a true nerd legend. But if he did write books I imagine they"d look like this.

(it’s funny because paper wasps are actually a subgroup of vespid wasps)

ANYWAYS — wasps are very cool and I think we have sadly overlooked them throughout time.

TODAY THIS ENDS.

We are going to specifically have a look at the emerald cockroach wasp and she really is a beauty.

Gorgeous ain’t she?

Well she is very aesthetically pleasing, but not the nicest because she is a parasitoid wasp. This means that she lays her egg inside a host insectwhilst it is still alive and then the larvae hatches and eats the host from the inside out.

Not ideal.

But at least she does it in a VERY COOL WAY.

Now if you are going to lay your eggs in another insect it is very handy for you if that insect stays alive. That way the insect doesn’t start to decompose (putting your lovely egg at risk of microbial attack) and it keeps a nice constant environment in which your egg can live.

Some insects do this by paralyzing their hosts. That is all very well but one of the big problems is that you then need to find a way of hiding your host. If ya leave it out and about something else is gonna eat it.

Well there are options. You can try and carry the host back to your nest. But this wasp lays its eggs in cockroaches and they are quite hefty so that’s not a great option. In fact they are six times larger than the wasp.

So what she does is pretty ingenious. She stalks her cockroach host and then stings it in the thorax to temporarily paralyze it.

AND THIS IS WHERE THE BADASSERY OCCURS.

She uses specialised sensory organs on the tip of her stinger to locate a very specific ganglion within the cockroach brain that controls its escape reflex. She then injects a neurotoxic substance which makes the cockroach become really sluggish and stops showing its normal escape responses. It becomes totally docile.

The wasp then takes the cockroach by its antennae and WALKS IT BACK TO HER NEST LIKE A BAD ASS.

She then lays her eggs by it and leaves the living, totally stupid and unwilling-to-escape cockroach in her nest and her eggs hatch and eat it from the inside.

I KNOW.

SO COOL.

Hope you enjoyed.

Lots of love Flora xxx