Mega wasp named after Indonesian mythical beast

Rowan Hooper, news editor

(Image: Lynn Kimsey and Michael Ohl)

As wasps go, the solitary digger wasps are perhaps my favourites. Females paralyse other insects, bury them in the ground and lay an egg on them, so provisioning their offspring with a living food source.

Among behavioural ecologists digger wasps are revered as a key animal, having been studied by one of the fathers of animal behaviour, Niko Tinbergen. They have also been used by philosopher Daniel Dennett in his thinking about free will and they are just inherently cool insects.

But this beast - a new genus of digger wasp, collected in the 1930s from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi but undescribed until now - may just be the coolest yet.

Pitch black, with massive, sickle-shaped jaws, the beast has been named Megalara garuda. Garuda refers to the part-human, part-eagle mythical symbol of Indonesia. Nothing is known of the wasp's behaviour, but discoverers Lynn Kimsey of the University of California, Davis, and Michael Ohl of the Museum f?r Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany, speculate that the jaws may be used for grasping females during copulation.

Journal reference: ZooKeys DOI: 10.3897

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