Trigger warning: At the bottom of the page this post contains wasp pictures. Slightly magnified for research purposes, they can also be used for desensitization by people with wasp phobias. People need to deal with these phobias. Most paper wasps are both useful and friendly animals.
Glyphosate Awareness
Long, college reading level, blog on the current state of GMO regulations.
Breast cancer correlated with use of "pesticides," generally, including glyphosate.
Music
Sixto Rodriguez.
Neil Young.
Emancipator.
"Triangles in the Sky."
Santana.
Vaccine Accountability
Have some vaccines proved to be, on the whole, safe and effective? Yes. But even those vaccines aren't 100% safe--or 100% effective--and they were identified only by trial and error, with some early results as ghastly as the results of the COVID vaccines recently or the flu vaccines in the 1970s.
Wasps, the Periodic Rant
There are caterpillars that eat other insects. When inchworms stand straight out at an angle to a branch, they're not just trying to disguise themselves as twigs; turns out some of them are hunting for tiny gnats, which they're able to grab between their six "true" legs and eat. (As a group, these little pugilists are nicknamed Pugs.) There's a British butterfly, which will probably be our Butterfly of the Week in another five or ten years if the web site lasts so long, and which, as a caterpillar, lives among ants and eats their pet aphids. Seriously. British ants rear aphids, take them out to munch on leaves, bring them in so the ants can eat aphid digest, which apparently tastes sweet, and then the caterpillars eat some of these aphids. And there's a moth, which obviously I feel less keen on than the wasp hater featured in this video, whose caterpillar attacks paper wasp larvae. Before raving about how cool this moth is, one could consider how many mosquitoes, caterpillars--even tent caterpillars, which are too furry and too toxic for most predators--flies, gnats, aphids, and other nuisances paper wasps eat. I like paper wasps and would be inclined to kill a Sooty-Winged Chalcoela (the wasp hater seems to be reading the name as Chalcoeia, but it's Chalcoela, with two L's) if I found one. Nevertheless:
The caterpillars are about the same size as baby wasps, and look similar. Instead of resting in the nest while their parents bring them food, the caterpillars chew their way from cell to cell, eating the back ends of the baby wasps, and then eventually pupate in a cell where they look like pupating wasps. Nasty sneaky little things!
In the video you see them parasitizing Polistes dominula, which Wikipedia lists as their favorite prey species. P. dominula is a bit of an invasive nuisance that can out-compete native wasps like Polistes fuscatus if you're not careful. (P. fuscatus are my favorites--they can sting, but individuals don't pack much venom and they would really rather be friends.) And in the video you see dominula devouring a little Monarch caterpillar, which does occasionally happen. Nevertheless.
Photo from Wikipedia.
Polistes exclamans is a different species that can be mistaken for dominula. Their body colors can vary but their distinguishing feature is their three-colored antennae. They have evolved strategies for fighting back and coexisting with the Sooty-Winged Chalcoela, but their strategies are only partly effective, according to
Photo from Wikipedia.
Polistes metricus can be mistaken for fuscatus, and often capitalizes on the resemblance by actually sharing nests with fuscatus The wasps don't seem to crossbreed but they live together as neighbors, possibly because fuscatus aren't a preferred target of the Sooty-Winged Chalcoela. To ordinary human view they look just alike, except that metricus have yellow on their legs. Under a microscope they have different body shapes, and metricus seems more "closely related" to other species with which it doesn't share nests. Both species are generally peaceable. Metricus may specialize more in eating caterpillars while fuscatus eat more gnats and mosquitoes; this has not been fully documented.
In the Southwestern States and Mexico these species are often displaced by a more aggressive native paper wasp, Polistes apachus (sometimes called P. texanus). If apachus prefer to live in peace, nobody has documented the fact or discussed how they go about making friends. They often infest fig orchards and attack fig pickers. Probably nobody cares how many of them may be eaten by Sooty-Winged Chalcoelas.
Mischocyttarus flavitarsis has a different body shape from the Polistes paper wasps and does not live in my part of the world. It's another favorite target for Sooty-Winged Chalcoelas. It is described as having a rather appealing little foible: its odor (not conspicuous to humans) repels the ant species that are its primary predators, so it tries to defend itself and its nest by ramming and rubbing against surfaces rather than stinging. It does have a sting but, reportedly, humans have to crush the individual wasp or damage the nest to find out whether they're sensitive to its venom. Most people aren't.
Photo from inaturalist.com. Wikipedia has an article about this species, but not a clear photo.
Another wasp that attracts the Sooty-Winged Chalcoela is Jack Spaniard, Polistes annularis, the paper wasp most people would like to see go extinct. It was nicknamed "Spaniard" in colonial days, when that name referred to enemy soldiers who fought Englishmen with swords, because the wasps always seem ready to whip out their little "swords" and sting people. Distinguished by a yellow ring separating its reddish anterior and blackish posterior sections, annularis gives all paper wasps a bad name. It is slightly bigger than fuscatus and packs much more venom. And it just generally does not like humans.
Photo from Wikipedia. Each Wikipedia article about each of these wasps can be reached from links in the other articles, so I shouldn't have to go back and copy each URL after copying each picture...
The trouble with identifying this species is that, until annularis has behaved like annularis (attacking someone for no obvious reason), it doesn't look all that different from other paper wasps. In fact some harmless fuscatus mimic annularis.
This is a typical fuscatus found in Virginia. On close examination she has quite a bit of red and yellow coloring, though from a distance she just looks dark brown, or, in Latin, fuscatus. She is both blacker (in front) and more colorful (overall) than annularis, and also smaller--even the breeding queens of this species are often less, never more, than an inch long. The color markings vary considerably among nest mates and help individuals recognize one another. They recognize individual humans, too.
But this fuscatus from Florida has clearly evolved to mimic annularis. Though smaller and more colorful, she does show that warning color pattern!And so, in a general way, does one of the fuscatus on the screen porch who are currently supervising the writing of this blog post.
Apart from size there are other significant differences between fuscatus and annularis. Polistes fuscatus like to eat insects that annoy humans and often nest in or near our homes. When a new little queen wasp hatches, in early spring and as each generation replaces the one before it all year, she will fly toward the humans in the house and check them out. If they stand still and don't make hasty or aggressive moves, they are friends and she will positively protect them. (She doesn't have much room for thinking about new information. She has fantastic instincts and memory but her brain's not wired for real thinking.) Fuscatus will occasionally taste something sweet or tangy, like fruit, but don't have much appetite for sugar and don't try to store sugar in their nests. They use fibre from plants and insect bodies to make "paper," and live primarily on protein and fat from other insects. They can both kill and carry insects up to twice their own size. I have seen an inch-long fuscatus carrying a two-inch-long tent caterpillar.
Annularis, conversely, usually nest above water, eat primarily aquatic insects, often visit flowers for nectar, may do some accidental pollination, and can even be said to make honey since they sometimes store partly digested nectar in cells of their nests.
The most obvious difference between these species, when the likable ones mimic the nasty ones, is their stinging behavior. Annularis are full of venom; their sting has been described, by people who are not hypersensitive to it, as like an injection of hot lava under the skin. A sting on the hand might cause the hand to puff up enough to interfere with use of the fingers for a few days. Annularis are the paper wasps most likely to sting a person just because they like the landscape better without humans in it. Fuscatus have little venom; their sting is usually described as like touching a big blunt needle or splinter, and discomfort lasts for minutes, not days. They may panic and sting strangers approaching their nest in a hasty impulsive way, but not without giving the strangers every chance to greet the wasps properly and establish friendly relationships. They will chase a person who runs away from them, presumably finding it profitable to let their behavior evolve along the theory that the person had a bad conscience and was dangerous. They quickly learn to like fluorescent lights, especially shop and desk lights where a lot of freshly killed insect bodies can accumulate between tubes and frames. Since they like the insects that annoy humans they are highly motivated to make friends with us.
So, for that matter, are dominula.
Photo from Wikipedia. This European species, an unwelcome immigrant in North America, is typically only about three-fourths of an inch long.
I all but literally heard one, whose nest I was inclined to scrape off the screen door, as she paused and held eye contact with me while carrying a fly in her mouth: "All I want is to rear my babies in peace." I do scrape and burn dominula nests in winter. In summer, when the wasps are making themselves useful, I leave them in peace. That summer, I propped that screen door open while the young wasps grew up. Though smaller than fuscatus, they are more venomous (their sting may burn a bit for several hours), but they too really want to coexit peaceably with humans. If they can. They do silly things like building nests on doors and defending the said nests every time the doors are used, because despite their awesome instincts they are really not very bright, but they mean well. If they nest on a door it's not hard to make friends with them, then approach the nest early in the morning when everyone is asleep, scrape it off into a jar, clap a lid on the jar, and dump out the wasps more than half a mile away.
That the Sooty-Winged Chalcoela attacks vicious annularis and seldom attacks friendly fuscatus is almost enough to reconcile me to this moth...but I don't like animals that molest my wasps. Period.
