[HN Gopher] Another new wasp species discovered by researchers
___________________________________________________________________
Another new wasp species discovered by researchers
Author : wglb
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-09-23 22:15 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| wglb wrote:
| A companion video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL21hTKOIVA
| peppermint_gum wrote:
| This is a spam video composed of stock footage. It doesn't add
| any new information, it shows some random wasp species,
| unrelated to the ones just discovered, and some random
| scientists (possibly actors).
| User23 wrote:
| My first thought was "is it parasitic?" And then I click and of
| course it is.
|
| Parasitic wasps are gross, but fascinating. If I recall correctly
| there is a parasitic wasp that parasitizes a parasitic wasp that
| parasitizes a parasitic wasp that parasitizes some kind of
| caterpillar.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Parasitism of any kind is fascinating, and is often horrific.
|
| I was on a bird walk yesterday morning and one of the
| participants pointed out a brightly colored black and yellow
| millipede that had climbed up a tree trunk. What was it doing
| there? I can't be sure, but that species is subject to attack
| by a fungus that takes control and makes it climb up tree
| trunks, walls, fenceposts, etc. so that as it expires it
| discharges spores well above the ground.
|
| A relevant SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2331
|
| Parasitic wasp interactions are also where nature is truly
| vicious. A predator like a big cat will hunt many times over
| its life. It cannot risk too much in each encounter, so the
| interactions are to some extent subdued, the prey often
| escaping. But with parasitic wasps, it may succeed just once in
| its life. The stakes are as high as they can be, and the wasp
| can risk all to succeed.
| hinkley wrote:
| Cordyceps?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Arthrophaga myriapodina
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthrophaga_myriapodina
|
| The millipede species:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apheloria_virginiensis
| blipvert wrote:
| It's parasitic wasps all the way down.
| mc_maurer wrote:
| The term for parasitoids that attack other parasitoids is a
| "hyperparasitoid". I did my PhD on parasitoids that attack
| aphids, but I've never heard of a hyper-hyperparasitoid, do you
| have any reference to that example?
| yannis wrote:
| I love this type of studies is your thesis available
| somewhere on the web?
| throwup238 wrote:
| I was under the impression that it's fairly common?
| The caterpillar: Often a pest species like the tomato
| leafminer Primary parasitoid: Cotesia glomerata
| Secondary parasitoid: Lysibia nana and some species from the
| genus Gelis like agilis Tertiary parasitoid: Certain
| species within the Trichogramma or Eulophidae families.
| klyrs wrote:
| I recently discovered the existence of hyperparasitoid wasps
| much to the delight of my entomologist friend. That these
| things fly and have working nervous system (apparently
| ditching the neuronal nuclei during metamorphosis?), the
| ability to navigate etc. continues to blow my mind. They are
| _so_ tiny!
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/480294a
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Wow! At that size, I wonder if it's even technically still
| flying, or more like swimming through a thick Brownian
| motion soup.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| Some of the wasps have even developed a mutualistic
| relationship with a virus that helps control the hosts immune
| system. The wasps have integrated the virus genome into their
| own so their offspring can continue to infect hosts.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3758193/
| throwanem wrote:
| ...and evolved a unique type of ovarian "calyx" cell, which
| acts as a bioreplicator to produce virus which the mother
| wasp delivers during oviposition.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12692280/
| kennethrc wrote:
| > If I recall correctly there is a parasitic wasp that
| parasitizes a parasitic wasp that parasitizes a parasitic wasp
| that parasitizes some kind of caterpillar.
|
| "Yo Dawg, we heard you like parasites, so we put a parasite
| INSIDE your parasite INSIDE ..."
| Scarblac wrote:
| The smallest known insects are also parasitic wasps:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicopomorpha_echmepterygis
|
| They're wild. They're born _inside the eggs of barklice_ , and
| _mate there_. Males are ~186 micrometer, smaller than some
| single celled organisms like amoeba!
| tzs wrote:
| > A newly identified wasp species, Chrysonotomyia susbelli, has
| been discovered in Houston, Texas, marking the 18th new species
| identified by Rice University's Scott Egan and his research team
| since 2014. The discovery, the fourth wasp species found on the
| university grounds in seven years, reveals the hidden world of
| parasitoid wasps and the intricate ecosystems that thrive outside
| our doors.
|
| A nice illustration of how much we still don't know about
| insects. There are around 7 000 new insect species found every
| year. Entomologists estimate that there are around 10 000 000
| undiscovered insect species.
|
| I read a great popular science book on insects [1] (well, I
| listened to the audiobook edition...does that count as reading
| it?), and the author said that every summer he put traps to catch
| flying insects outside his New England house, and nearly every
| summer he would find insects that were not yet known to science.
| He'd even find parasitic wasps, the type of insect he was one of
| the world's foremost experts on, that were not yet known to
| science.
|
| When it comes to discovering new insect species it seems the hard
| part is not actually _finding_ them. To do that you just have to
| regularly capture insects. You don 't even have to go to some
| exotic place that humans have rarely visited--your backyard is
| probably good enough.
|
| The hard part is recognizing that one of the ones you captured is
| not one of the 1 000 000 species already known.
|
| [1] "Life on a Little Known Planet: A Biologist's View of Insects
| and Their World" by parasitic wasp expert Howard Ensign Evans.
| https://www.amazon.com/Life-Little-Known-Planet-Biologists/d...
| westward wrote:
| I'm curious to know if "newly discovered" species existed 20
| years ago and were actually just discovered, or if they are a new
| species that didn't exist until recently.
|
| Is there a way to tell?
|
| Examining old hosts that have died and been preserved and seeing
| if the 'new species' exists there maybe?
| stolen_biscuit wrote:
| > I'm curious to know if "newly discovered" species existed 20
| years ago and were actually just discovered,
|
| That's exactly it, these wasps existed previously and were just
| discovered to be distinct from other wasps. Speciation tends to
| take a very long time (on the order of hundreds of thousands to
| millions of years) or much shorter if there's a strong enough
| pressure (e.g. something drastically alters an ecosystem and
| opens up a lot of new niches for a species to radiate into) but
| still on the order of tens of thousands of years, see [1] for a
| great example. This of course depends on generation time
| (evolution only happens to populations, not individuals), so we
| see quite rapid evolution in things with short generation times
| like bacteria.
|
| For invetebrates like small wasps like this one, it's typically
| taking the time to sit down and actually identifying them, some
| species are quite cryptic and it's only obscure or small
| morphological features that can be used to separate them by
| eye, and requires genetic analysis to compare and confirm that
| it's a new species.
|
| > Examining old hosts that have died and been preserved and
| seeing if the 'new species' exists there maybe?
|
| I have an entomologist friend and yes, that does happen. There
| are probably countless new species that have specimens in
| museums and universities right now that just haven't been
| properly analysed
|
| 1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-
| extraordinary...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-09-26 23:01 UTC)