Can anyone identify this visitor to my terrace for me?
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9 comments:
I don't know what it is, but whatever it is it is *freaking* me out!!! *shudder*
Ooo! It's a scorpion wasp. (Thanks to the Collins Complete British Wildlife.)
The insects lay their eggs inside other creatures, allowing the young to eat the host from inside when hatched. They're the creatures that convinced Charles Darwin that something quite so horrible couldn't have been created by a god.
Ew, more like. I hope it didn't go near my cats, they were paying it far too much attention.
A scorpion wasp huh? I was gonna offer up something more benign, but the more I look... hmm.
*wanders off to Wikipedia and then some entomological sites*
I think your identification is correct. I'll see if an expert can give me the binomial name based on these pics.
I submitted the pics (I hope I had your implicit permission, Raelha) to an entomologist in Indiana. I told him that these are very recent pics from Asturias, Spain. I hope he writes me back soon! Nerds like entomologists usually go out of their way to do this kind of thing.
Meanwhile I found a very similar bug in the same order (hymenoptera) photographed by a guy in Colorado and called a "scorpion wasp" by him as well, though he said no one else he spoke to knew what he was talking about. They seem rare at best in the States, from the sites I looked at.
From his photos, the bug he found looks almost identical morphologically but strangely lacks the orange-coloured legs (his appears almost completely black).
My guess is they are different species adapted to their local environments, but related enough, probably in the same genus, for the name "scorpion wasp" to be used in both cases. I don't think that name would be a coincidence.
Sounds like a pretty nasty specimen though! From Stewart's description I'd probably forget I was Buddhist for a moment and squish that sucker. Although this guy in Colorado apparently found his injured, actually nursed it back to health, and then let it go. Go figure.
Well, very nice shots of it anyway! I wonder how you do it sometimes... so the camera is working again? I thought it had finally given up the ghost. Or have you procured a new one? I wish I could send you my Canon but I just use it too much and can't afford to replace it. If I ever do, it's yours.
And I'll let you know if my entomologist at Indiana University comes up with the same ID. (I didn't mention Stewart's, just to keep the experiment fair.)
Ooh, this will be fun!
Meta.
Meta,
Ooh, interesting I'm eager to hear what he says. I'd never seen anything like it before.
It's the still the old camera. It mostly isn't working but every now and again decides to give it a go before sinking back into it's more common non-functionning state. I haven't been abe to coax it back to working order for about a week now :(
I think it is a cuddly little teddy bear.
I'll leave it to you to cuddle that one Lorenzo!
Yep, he's all yours.
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