Tarantula Hawk Wasp

Tarantula Hawk (Wasp) (Pepsis and Hemipepsis spp)
The U.S. State of New Mexico chose this insect in 1989 to become its official state insect (Pepsis formosa). (What on earth were they thinking?)

Body lengths measures up to two inches, and the wasps are rather robust and are metallic irridescent blue-black with wings that are blue-black, irridescent black, bright orange, red, orangish or mahogany in color. Warning: tarantula hawks are aposematically-colored for a reason -- they give the most painful sting of any insect in the U.S. or Mexico and are the fourth most painful sting of any insect in the animal kingdom. However, they are not aggressive.
Only a few animals, such as roadrunners, eat tarantula hawks.

The wasps are "nectivorous," especially fond of milkweed flowers and they have been known to become "flight-challenged" after consuming fermented fruit. (Drunk wasps with horribly painful stings — sounds like giving a loaded gun and car keys to a drunk, angry teenager...)

A female wasp finds a tarantula by smell. Generally, she scampers across the ground to locate a burrow. She will enter the burrow and expel the spider, then attack it. She may also encounter a male tarantula during his search for a mate. Once stung, the tarantula becomes paralyzed within seconds. The condition will last for the remainder of its life. She will drag it back into its own burrow, now a burial vault, lay a single egg on the spider’s abdomen, then seal the chamber. When the larval wasp hatches, it begins feeding on the still-paralyzed tarantula, beginning first with the non-essential organs. After about 30 days, the wasp larva has finally consumed most of the tarantula (which now dies), and the larva pupates and eventually metamorphoses into an adult wasp.

She is standing directly over the filled in hole of the tarantula burrow she has just filled. She was moving 1.5 inch (4 cm) rocks of over .5 oz (14g)each around like tinkertoys stuffing them in the hole. Very strong wasp.

Top 10 Kings Of Pain - alphabetical

Black Widow Spiders
Box Jellyfish
Bullet Ants
Gila Monsters
Naja Ashei - giant spitting cobra - excruciating in the eyes.
Scorpions
Stingrays
Stonefish
Tarantula Hawk Wasps
Vipers - Rattlesnakes bites

Cropped, ©, and Framed.

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