There are plenty of parasitoid wasps who engage in this demented behavior. The new species has a huge stinger and I think – this is only a hypothesis – that it could also use it, as a kind of crowbar, to enter some holes in the tree surface etc, in order to reach the spider hosts. “So, the wasp uses the ovipositor for injecting venom to the spider host and as a felting needle. “The biology of the Clistopyga genus is very interesting,” Sääksjärvi says. So those giant stingers are poison darts, ovipositors, crochet needles, battering rams and bayonets all in one. They’re also for stunning and killing spiders as incubation hosts, wrapping them up in their own webs, and injecting them with wasp eggs. Here’s where things get even more interesting: Clistopyga stingers aren’t just for stinging. Sääksjärvi, a professor in the biodiversity unit at the University of Turku, told CNN he and his team discovered the Clistopyga crassicaudata, technically a parasitoid wasp, from a group of samples recovered from Peru. You can see it in the photo above, protruding straight out from the otherwise normal-looking wasp body.
A group of scientists from the University of Turku in Finland have discovered a new species of wasp, and it is basically a tiny supervillain that sports an almost comically massive stinger. Have you ever seen a wasp and thought, “Gee, I wonder how we can make these non-pollinating, human-hating demon insects even worse?”
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