The “Godzilla” wasp swims: so its young can burst from the caterpillars

Thanks for join us for this short piece of election counter-planning that may or may not make you feel better, depending on how you feel about parasitic wasps. Because, sure, we’re all stressed to death, but at least one wasp didn’t inject you with an egg that hatches into a maggot that feeds on your nutrients before bursting out of your body.

But let me back off. The caterpillar stage of the aquatic moth Disturbed Elophila it lives in the freshwater ecosystems of Africa and Asia. It is a type of creature that does not waste, feeds on the vegetation that floats on the surface and uses the material to build a case as a protective home. It is placed in the middle of the vegetation, just below the waterline. There he lives a peaceful life, munching, getting bigger, doing bigger cases every now and then, without worrying about the elections.

So a female Microgaster godzilla arrives. That scientific name is not a misspelled or slightly odd translation of Latin, but a very intentional honorific that researchers bestowed on a species of parasitoid wasp (meaning a parasite that kills its host) in a new article in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research. The pop culture Godzilla emerges from the sea to make life miserable for humans, and this wasp does the same for moth caterpillars. Also, Godzilla once fought Mothra, and Microgaster godzilla threatens the caterpillars of aquatic moths.

“I am guilty of naming many species with funny names,” says the study’s lead author, Jose Fernandez-Triana of the Canadian National Collection of Insects. “In the past I have named one Key Lime Pie. And I called a kind of wasps Toblerone after the Toblerone chocolate bar. I named one after Crocodile Dundee “, an Australian species, of course.” We have some fun, and why not? “He asks.

The Dundee crocodile has nothing on our Godzilla wasp, though. To see it in action, the researchers collected aquatic caterpillars from ponds in Japan and bred the emerged wasps. They then released each wasp into an aquarium in the lab with 20 other caterpillars and recorded the ensuing chaos with a video camera.

The footage, above, puts any file Godzilla film to be shamed for lack of inventiveness. The wasp walks along the vegetation that Disturbed Elophila hang out, looking for an aquatic caterpillar in its enclosure. When the parasitoid finds one, it taps the case with its antennae and dives to extract it from its protective shell. Fleeing for its life, the caterpillar crops out in the vegetation above his house, only to let the wasp emerge from the water, Godzilla-style. The wasp grabs the caterpillar and guides its ovipositor into the soft body, injecting a single egg.