This blog often complains about the poor understanding in England regarding wasps. I began drafting this post in the midst of what’s known as ‘the silly season’, when Britain’s tabloid newspapers turn their guns on gulls, wasps and spiders, with a seasonal vacuum in news. However, in a global pandemic there is no real vacuum in news, and there is no way I’m going to go looking through those rags for stories I know are rubbish. Perhaps it’s my Scouse heritage.
What I didn’t expect was for YouGov to run a poll on the most hated invertebrates in the UK. I don’t understand how this helps in a time when invert populations – which we depend on for survival – are crashing. You know what they say, don’t trust the polls. Unless it’s the most recent ones in which case please God let it be true.
Moving on.
Yes, you guessed it, this is another post about wasps. This time, it’s some of the smallest wasps in the world. The group I encountered, and which are shown here, could amount to a total of 500,000 species, with about 470,000 of those species unknown to science. Do you need help picking your jaw off the floor?
Reminder: we are just the one species, Homo sapiens.
You have to think sometimes – imagine all the ecological networks and relationships between species which we actually have no idea about. In places of the highest biodiversity, they’re being made extinct by the loss of habitat, before we even know they exist. Jair Bolsonaro has more to answer for than we may yet realise.
The wasp photographed here is now a species I know thanks to iNaturalist – a chalcid wasp in the genus Ormyrus. ‘Chalcid’ comes from the Greek word for ‘copper’ because they have a metallic appearance.
Back in August I visited a nature reserve local to me. The meadows had far more seed heads than flowers and I wasn’t intending to see a huge amount of invertebrate life. I give up on birds around July when they go on their holidays, usually low in a bush somewhere.
In actual fact I found a lot of species, many of them quite happy to be photographed, though of course not yet understanding of what a photograph is. I was drawn to a large area of dead nettle, a family so big there are many plants I just don’t know the names of yet.
Looking at some of the leaves of the plant, I noticed something about 3-5mm in length, resting on the leaf. When I looked through the macro lens and additional extension tube, which magnifies the view further, I could see it was a type of wasp.
This wasp is obviously a great deal bigger than that. That said, I couldn’t see that it had red eyes without some magnification.
Chalcid wasps are parasitic species, as outlined by their Wikipedia entry:
Most of the species are parasitoids of other insects, attacking the egg or larval stage of their host, though many other life cycles are known. These hosts are to be found in at least 12 different insect orders including Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), Diptera (true flies), Coleoptera (beetles), Hemiptera (true bugs), and other Hymenoptera, as well as two orders of Arachnida, and even one family of nematodes.
Wikipedia via iNaturalist
I’ve written about parasitic wasps before.
Now I don’t know much about the very small wasps, and one thing I really didn’t know was just how small they get. Some species of wasps are smaller than the width of a human hair, or even smaller than a single-celled organism!
Perhaps they’ll be the ones to get pilloried during 2022’s tabloid silly season. In truth, I doubt it.
Thanks for reading.
Daniel Greenwood 
I don’t recall a year when we have seen so few wasps. It is very worrying.
As John says, very few wasps this year here, either.
Such a fascinating post as always – I had no idea that wasps are so varied!
Thank you Emma. Yes we only really learn about the black and yellow ones but there are thousands more!