The tropics are teeming with life, tending to hold far more species than milder environments closer to the poles. But one group of insects, the Darwin wasps, were thought to buck that trend.
It’s easy to look for wasps in a British garden, says Peter Mayhew, but “it’s very hard to do long-term work” in a tropical rainforest. Mayhew, a biologist at the University of York in England, was up to the challenge.
Now, after years of sifting through wasps collected from a single mountain in the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest a decade ago, Mayhew and colleagues have identified nearly 100 Darwin wasp species. The result, published November 7 in the journal Insects, suggests that the tropics are home to far more types of the wasp than was previously recognized.
Darwin wasps are one family of parasitic wasps, the Ichneumonidae, which lay their eggs on or inside other creepy-crawlies so that the hatched larvae have a ready-made meal (SN: 7/28/56; SN: 8/5/15). In this way, the Alien-esque wasps help control the populations of their prey, serving a vital ecological role similar to that of apex predators like wolves and sharks. With 25,000 described species, there are more kinds of Darwin wasp than there are known mammal and bird species combined.
2023-11-28 07:00:00
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