Collecting Killer Wasps in Puerto Rico
May 14, 2018
Dr. Carly Tribull – who was featured on the FSC and SUNY websites a few months ago for the biology comics she draws for her students – is going to Puerto Rico this week on a hunting expedition for wasps.
Dr. Carly Tribull
Not just any wasps: she’ll be looking for wasps from the Bethylidae and Dryinidae families. What makes them distinctive is that these wasps lay their eggs in other insects. The eggs hatch and the larval wasps eat their hosts from the inside out, until they eventually burst out of the host, killing them. Not a field trip for the faint of heart.
“This sounds gruesome,” said Dr. Tribull, stating the obvious, “but these wasps are actually very important controls on the population sizes of their hosts. We are collecting in Puerto Rico because these wasps are very understudied in the area, and we hope to identify new species and location records for known species.”
Dr. Tribull and horticulture student Elizabeth Hickey are going to the El Verde Field Station in the El Yunque National Forest, where they will be round up wasps not with butterfly nets, but things called malaise traps and yellow pan traps. From the way Dr. Tribull describes them, the wasps don’t stand a chance.
“The malaise traps are large tent-like structures that insects fly into. They hit a central wall, instinctively crawl up, and eventually are funneled into a vial of alcohol, which preserves them.” The yellow pan traps (wasps and bees especially like the color yellow) are plastic bowls filled with water that drowns the insects.
And what will Dr. Tribull do with the wasps and other insects she’ll collect?
They will be used, she said, to build the entomology teaching collection in the biology department, providing a valuable resource for students in Entomology 198.
