here's your creepy nature fact of the day

[queenlua]

a few weeks ago i was birding with a friend, and while we didn't see many birds—bad weather, bad time of year—we did see one bizarre/cool bit of insect interaction.

we were watching a spider making its web, when a big black flying arthropod slammed into it—full-body, full-force, knocking the spider clean out of the web, right?

we then found the spider on the ground, looking like it was spasming/flailing a bit, then saw the arthropod slam into it again—and this time, the arthropod stayed on top of the spider until the spider stopped moving.

"that's some fucked up red-in-tooth-and-claw shit," we said to ourselves, and moved on, but—

some later research indicates what we probably saw was a parasitic wasp? which is the most messed-up sci-fi spooky thing i've learned about in a while—basically, there's so much goddamn biomass in the form of arthropods roaming around, that it makes sense for species to evolve to exploit that biomass, and thus, you'll get a species of parasitic wasp that specifically lays its eggs in a specific species of spider (eventually killing the spider), and a different species of parasitic wasp that lays its eggs in some other species of spider...

freaky designer-drug hyper-targeted-bio-killer shit! but also, what an incredibly fascinating find? nature is so weird. i love birding because even if i dip on an owl i can learn new fucked-up things about insects and that's almost as cool lol

Comments

[mellific]

A FLYING WASP TACKLE oh my god that's wildly cool??? My parasitoid wasp fun fact is that when California imported eucalypts en masse from Australia, they enjoyed like a hundred years of beautiful "none of our native insect enemies live here!" growth and then ALL the eucalyptus-feeding insects arrived to a tree buffet in the 80s so California imported a bunch of parasitoid wasps from Australia to counter them, which, apparently works & has no repercussions despite the extremely old-lady-who-swallowed-a-fly setup? (It is only medium effective because there are just. So Many Eucalyptus-Feeding Insects.)

[queenlua]

omg. that... makes so much sense, that that'd be a consequence of the whole chucking-trees-across-the-pacific thing, but never would've occurred to me on my own & AMAZING that the parastoid imports worked so well haha. we're up to THREE HUNDRED PERCENT returns in this comment section tyty very much for more INSECT FACTS