As of today, I am the parent of an adult. This is weird. Everything about it is weird.
Me being old enough to have an adult child? Weird.
Me having been a parent for 18 years? Weird.
Just weird.
Also in the category of weird is the feature organism for a Wasp Wednesday: the Pelecinid Wasp.
Friends, I’ve been lucky enough to meet this lovely lady on several occasions, including once on the sidewalk near my house. The one in the photo I met at Lac du Bonnet. And yes, you are far more likely to meet a female rather than a male – it seems that in many places there are few, if any, males around. In such situations the females can reproduce and get along just fine on their own. The fancy scientific term for this is ‘parthenogenesis‘. The males look similar but have a much short ‘back end’ – consider yourself blessed by universe if you happen to meet one!
Now, while my children were born in a hospital and attended to by their parents and assorted medical professionals, the babies (larvae) of this wasp are ‘born’ on or in June Beetle grubs which the larvae promptly consume after hatching.
The long bit of this wasp is its ovipositor, the use of which is clear from the word’s Latin etymology: ov = egg (as in ‘ovulation’) and positor = placer (or ‘positioner’ if you want to make up a word), so literally an ‘egg placer’. The female wasp uses its ovipositor to root around in the soil to find a beetle grub and, upon finding one, inserts the tip of the ovipositor into the grub and lays an egg.
As it is a rather important instrument, the female fastidiously cleans it (see this video).
Rest assured it has no interest or ability to ‘sting’ you (unless you happen to have June Beetle grubs inside of you, in which case you’ve likely got a bigger problem than the ovulatory attentions of a Pelecinid Wasp).
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