View Single Post
  #2  
Old 11-02-2008, 04:41 PM
[1ponders]'s Avatar
[1ponders] (Paul)
Retired, damn no pension

[1ponders] is offline
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Obi Obi, Qld
Posts: 18,778
While I haven't seen the particular wasp you are talking about, wingless female wasps are not uncommon in Australia, particularly in deserts.

An interesting side note is that many Australian terrestrial orchid mimic these female wasps to fool the males into mating with them so that pollen is deposited onto the male wasps abdomen which is then transported to another flower. A common local wasp that does this is the Ichneuman (?) wasp ( the little red one with the black wings that flys around you couch lawn laying their eggs into lawn grub/ army worm). The orchid that this wasp tries to pseudo-copulate with is Pteristylis subulata and Pteristylis erecta.

Another interesting point about these wasps is that when the male picks the female up they start to mate inflight, and when the male finds a flower and starts to feed on the nectar the female receives the nectar through the male and doesn't actually feed herself.

An excellent old video that shows this (if you can get your hands on it) is "Sexual encounters of the floral kind" an old BBC video that is fascinating to watch and not just for the orchid info.
Reply With Quote