This is one badass wasp!
A lot of people are scared of wasps, and rightly so, their sting hurts and can really ruin your day. Plus there’s no panic quite like the fear that kicks in when you hear a buzzing noise right by your ear, and you drop whatever you’re holding, jump around flail your arms like you’ve just been zapped with a cattleprod. I KNOW it’s not just me.
Anyway, it’s not just us that should be scared of wasps. Spiders are, or should be, for a much more sinister reason than we do as well.
The Reclinervellus Nielseni wasp is BRUTAL.
The wasp is found in Australia and Japan, and a recent study has discovered just how cruel yet resourceful it is with spiders.
It lays an egg on the outside of the spiders body, and the wasp larva then hatches and attaches itself to the wasps abdomen. It then feeds on the spiders inner fluids, while causing the spider’s behaviour to change. It makes the spider build a web, then it sends the spider back, before killing it from the inside.
It doesn’t just build a web, like it normally would do. It builds a web specifically ideal for the larva, so 40 times stronger than a normal web.
Ruthless.
