Tarantula Hawk WaspPepsis grossa
Quick facts
- Rarity
- Rare
- Active during
- Midday
- Found in
- Dusty Canyons
- Length
- 3 in
- Wingspan
- 4 in
From the field notes
Diet
The adults are quite peaceful. They spend afternoons sipping nectar from wildflowers, and sometimes even get a little tipsy on fermented fruit.
The Sting
Females possess a quarter-inch stinger that delivers one of the most agonizing insect stings. The pain is described as blinding and electric. If stung, the official scientific advice is literally to "lie down and scream" until the agony passes.
The Nursery
When it's time to lay her eggs, a mother wasp tracks down a tarantula. She wrestles the spider and delivers a paralyzing sting. She then lays a single egg on the live tarantula and buries it alive, ensuring her newly hatched larva has a fresh meal.
Nemesis
The Greater Roadrunner is one of the only animals to hunt these wasps. These lightning-fast birds snatch the wasps out of the air, bashing them against a rock to neutralize the stinger before swallowing them whole.
Field Marks
Because only the females possess that agonizing stinger, it pays to know how to tell the sexes apart. Female wasps have distinctly curled antennae, while the males keep theirs perfectly straight.