Salute the Venerable Ensign Wasp, Killing Cockroaches for 25 Million Years
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Soycow_Lover:
Salute the venerable ensign wasp, killing cockroaches for 25 million years:
An Oregon State University study has identified four new species of parasitic, cockroach-killing ensign wasps that became encased in tree resin 25 million years ago and were preserved as the resin fossilized into amber.
"Some species of ensign wasps have even been used to control cockroaches in buildings," OSU researcher George Poinar Jr. said. "The wasps sometimes are called the harbingers of cockroaches-if you see ensign wasps you know there are at least a few cockroaches around. Our study shows these wasps were around some 20 or 30 million years ago, with probably the same behavioral patterns regarding cockroaches."
[...] A female ensign wasp will look for cockroach egg cases, known as ootheca, and lay an egg on or in one of the cockroach eggs inside the case. When the wasp egg hatches, the larva eats the cockroach egg where it was laid.
Successive instars of the larva then consume the other dozen or so eggs inside the cockroach egg case. Mature wasp larvae pupate within the cockroach egg case en route to coming out as adults, and no cockroach offspring emerge from an egg case infiltrated by an ensign wasp.
Analyzing Tertiary period specimens from Dominican amber, Poinar was able to describe three new species of ensign wasps: Evaniella setifera, Evaniella dominicana and Semaeomyia hispaniola. He described a fourth, Hyptia mexicana, from Mexican amber. The Tertiary period began 65 million years ago and lasted for more than 63 million years.
Journal Reference:
George Poinar, Ensign wasps (Hymenoptera: Evaniidae) in Dominican and Mexican amber, Historical Biology (DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2020.1818075)
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