Tanya Loos
Wonderful wasps may seem like a crazy thing to say particularly with the onset of European Wasp season. As the name suggests European wasps are introduced to Australia. These voracious predators wreak havoc on many of our beautiful Australian insects. For example researchers believe the decline of the beautiful Emperor Gum Moths species may be due to their caterpillars being preyed upon by European Wasps.
European Wasps also give our wasps a bad name ! We have a wonderful and diverse wasp fauna, and very few of them sting or bother humans in any way at all.
My favourite wasps are the flower wasps, the Thynnidae family. These often colourful or iridescent wasps are important pollinators for orchid species. The females are wingless! When they emerge from their burrows, the male wasps quickly pick up their scent and then carry them around from flower to flower – with their genitals! I didn’t capture it on film but a week or two ago I looked down and saw this happen – a female emerging, and then three or four males rapidly flying to her from out of nowhere – and one lucky fellow carrying her off!
The “blue ants” are also in the Thynnidae familiy – the very shiny bright females that you may have seen racing around your garden.
Many of our local wasps, including the flower wasps, have a special life history tactic – they are called parasitoids. Parasites such as fleas do not kill their host whereas parasitoids do. The females have long ovipositors and they actually insert these into their living host. In the case of flower wasps it is beetle larvae in the Scarab family. The young wasps eat their host from the inside out and when mature burst out of the host killing it in true horror gore style! “Wonderful?” I hear you ask. Well, these relationships have existed in a predator prey relationship for literally millions of years so are perfectly natural and part of the fascinating fabric of our biodiversity.
The beautifully engineered towers of the spider hunting wasp family, Pompilidae.
Another kind of native wasp builds those cute little terracotta towers around the entrance of their burrows. These are in the spider hunting wasp family Pompilidae. The tower building wasps are in the genus Fabrogenia. Like all spider hunting wasps, they paralyse their spider prey before carrying them back to their clay nest or burrow. The young then feed on the living bodies of the spiders until they emerge to repeat the cycle. Macabre and creepy but weird and wonderful!
Tanya Loos is a local naturalist, author and environmental consultant who loves to work in the environmental not-for-profit sector. She is the author of “Daylesford Nature Diary” available from her website or from Paradise Books in Vincent Street, Daylesford.
Have you got any nature questions for Tanya? Send them in!
