If you ever travel back in time to the reign of dinosaurs, don’t touch any flowers – it might just be a parasitic wasp in disguise. Analysis of wasps trapped in amber has revealed that the insect ensnared hosts for its larvae with an alluring, Venus flytrap-style butt.
Named Sirenobethylus charybdis, the insect is known from multiple specimens found preserved in amber from about 99 million years ago. At a glance it looks more or less like a wasp you’d shoo away today – until you get a closer look at the bizarre junk in its trunk.
Researchers at Capital Normal University in China and the Natural History Museum of Denmark investigated using micro-CT scans to analyze 16 specimens preserved in amber. They found that the bug’s abdomen is made up of three flaps, which could open into a kind of flower shape. Conveniently, some of the specimens had the abdomen open, and some were closed up.
The lower flap is covered with spines, and on the very tip are a dozen hair-like bristles. It looks suspiciously like a Venus flytrap, the team says – those little hairs might have told the wasp when something was approaching, so the flaps could close around it.
But the spines in the center were soft, and it doesn’t look like the aim was to crush the victim to death. No, its fate was much worse. Within reach was the wasp’s sting and its ovipositor – the tube-like appendage used by many insects to lay eggs. I’m sure you can see where this is going.
The team hypothesizes that the wasp could have laid in wait, luring potential host insects with its open trap, then snapped it shut around them. A quick sting could have paralyzed them temporarily, allowing the ovipositor to get to work injecting eggs into the hapless victim.
Afterwards, the trap would have released the insect, to go on their merry way. But if the wasp’s modern counterparts are anything to go by, the nightmare is just beginning. Those eggs hatch into larvae, which then consume the host from the inside out.
The researchers suggest that the wasp would have gone after small flying or hopping insects, like its descendants do, but its body wouldn’t have let it chase them very far. Instead, it seems to have developed this ambush strategy to lay its eggs and feed its young, unlike any parasite known today.
It looks like creatively creepy insect horror stories have been playing out since the time of the dinosaurs.
The research was published in the journal BMC Biology. You can see the micro-CT scan of a specimen in the video below.
Source: BioMed Central via Scimex
