The wasp won, BTW.



Linkie

Those black wasp's main diet is spiders! They burrow in the ground, fly out and find and kill spiders, drag the carcass back to the burrow, eat it and repeat the cycle.

In Spanish, we call that variety of wasp Avispon!

They are cool to watch plying their craft!

Rudy

I could be wrong but I think they actually lay their eggs in the carcass. I know some wasp that live under ground do this. This may not be one of them.

Good picture Bret! Did you get any pictures of the Wasp attacking/transporting that green caterpiller at Sunshine yesterday?

The spider gets paralyzed but still alive. The female wasp drags it to her burrow and lays an egg on it. The wasp larva feeds on the paralyzed spider.

I didn't have my (real) camera with me Saturday. But I wish I had brought it, I sure had time to use it. heh.

I'd always heard they layed their eggs in them to feed the young. Cicadas as well, I believe.

There are different families of wasps that attack different insects and spiders. Wasps in family Pompilidae attack spiders only, like in the photo above.

Cicada killers and mud daubers are in the family Sphecidae. The cicada killers paralyze a cicada, lug it back to its burrow, and lay an egg on it. The mud daubers paralyze spiders and pack them into their mud nests. Other sphecids will nab things like grasshoppers.

i don't feel the least bit sorry for that spider

Great info Tallgrass.


thanx.

When I was a kid, I used to knock down mud-dauber nests. If you break them open you'll almost always find spiders inside. They aren't dead....just paralyzed. Neat stuff.

Same here, BK. My parents live near Palestine, and there are tons of yellow argiope spiders around their place. I've broken open many a mud dauber nest and found it full of small argiopes (not the big adults--they are a bit large for wasps). It's amazing how they seem to specialize on that particular species of spider out there! Here's a pic of a big adult--very cool spiders!

I remember when I was in junior high, my science teacher has us go outside on catch bugs. We found a praying mantis and put it in an aquarium. Then somebody got the nerve up to catch a yellow jacket and put in with the praying mantis. Praying mantis ended up killing the yellow jacket.

I now have new respect for wasps.

I tried the same thing with a preying mantis and a brown tarantula. I found pieces of the preying mantis all over the terrarium.

I read on this forum, that someone found a mud daubber nest, broke it open and it was full of black widow spiders (that scares me). To make matters worse, the spiders started moving around.

I would have a little trouble sleeping after seeing that .

I had a pet tarrantula when I was a kid, it was pretty tough on about anything that went into the aquarium I kept him in. I would catch stuff around the light at night and just toss them in. Got a little shiny green beetle one night and tossed it in. Came back a few minutes later and the tarantula was missing 3 legs and was about dead (died a few days later). That was my introduction to the verocity of a "tiger beetle". Bad little fellows..