A guy finds a hole in his wall, and behind it, a strange leathery brown mass. He pulls it out -- first mistake. He cuts it open -- second mistake. Within…
It's a wasp nest stuffed full of dead spiders, each with an egg planted in them. It's just adorable. There are more photos. I was kind and picked the least horrific.
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I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty much collected the whole set. But until now I had somehow missed the gruesome glory that is a wasp named Ampulex compressa.
As an adult, Ampulex compressa…
I am deathly afraid of brown recluses like the one in the picture, the nasty little bugger. I never put on a pair of jeans without shaking them first, 'cause they like warm, dark places (and I know someone who was bitten by one hiding in her jeans), and when I recently found one in my medicine…
I'm heading out of blog contact for a couple days, so allow me to share one of my favorite posts, from last January--on wasps that perform brain surgery.
I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty…
So that title may be a little sensationalistic... but the web is alive this morning (no pun intended) with stories about an enormous series of interconnected webs spread out over a 200 yard area in North Texas. Researchers and visitors alike have been drawn to the sprawling web, but were uncertain…
Good odds that those spiders are not dead, merely comatose. The wasp wants them to stay alive enough to guarantee that their flesh is still fresh and delicious when the wasp larvae are ready to eat.
When in grad school I used to look at the nests of these critters for a now-forgotten project. Anyway the wasps that built the nests I was looking at in Northern Indiana collected crab spiders pretty much exclusively. Which I should think would be particularly difficult and dangerous as the spiders are ambush predators.