A two-fer shot!
I was in my kitchen today and saw this weird flying insect with a loooooong tail sitting outside the window. I grabbed the camera, went out on the roof and got a couple of shots before it took off.
Here's what I learned:
This is a female Ichneumon wasp. Its long “tail” is an ovipositor - an egg-layer. Typically, it will wander over the surface of logs, and tree trunks, tapping with its antennae, searching for the scent of wood boring larvae of the horntail wasps.
Upon sensing the vibrations emitted by a wood-boring host, the female wasp will drill her ovipositor into the wood until it reaches the cavity wherein lies the host. She then injects an egg through the hollow tube into the body cavity. There the egg will hatch and the resulting larva will devour its host before emergence.
How a female is able to drill with her ovipositor into solid wood is still somewhat of a mystery to science, though it has been found that there is metal (ionized manganese or zinc) in the extreme tip of some species' ovipositors. The adult insect, following pupation is faced with the problem of extricating itself from tunnels of its host. Fortunately, the high metal concentrations are not limited to the female's ovipositor as the mandibles of the adult are also hardened with metals and it uses these to chew itself out of the wood.
On a seemingly-unrelated note.............every May, without fail, I get some tiny red mites in my bathroom. I think they get in via a very old skylight. They're harmless, but DO leave a semi-indelible bright red stain if crushed.
There's one in the picture to the left of the end of the wasp's abdomen. I found out yesterday that it's a clover mite (and not a spider mite, which has two spots).
Clover mite and Ichneumon wasp - two terms I didn't know two days ago.
