It’s August here in New Zealand which means it is the middle of Winter. It rains almost every day here during winter.
Firewood piled outside the door is getting low so I earmarked two hours to barrow split wood from an auxiliary pile, stacked against the rear wall of the house, to the depleted pile, under cover of weather, at the house frontage.
The wood had been there for many months so it was full of spiders. Big spiders with brown chevrons on the back of their abdomen, Wolf spiders the locals call them, they can give you a nasty bite but they have insufficient venom to harm humanity. These spiders inhabit the underside of the split wood, they build silky white webs that resemble pouches. The webs catch inquisitive insects that search for food in the woodpile. The insects become entangled in the webs and the spiders pounce upon them and eat them. I saw plenty of evidence today of both the big spiders and what remains of their insect meals. Shells of the scarabs epidermis actually, all of the soft innards ****** out by the hungry spiders.
Also in the woodpile were several female Beech wasps, brightly colored little Hymenoptera with yellow and black banded stripes, with fearsome, sharp stingers protruding from the very end of the abdomen. These wasps were not sheltering in the woodpile from the falling rain, they were hunting for the big Wolf spiders. Arachnids ten times their size and equally as combative as the hunting wasps.
Undeterred by size and ferocity the wasps attack the huge spiders without hesitation, Make no mistake, war is waged here for should the spider lance the wasp with its fangs the wasp will die an agonizing death, but if the wasp manages to deftly spear the spider with its stinger, a powerful venom will be injected into the spider immediately paralyzing it…..but the venom doesn’t actually **** the spider, it immobilizes it. The female wasp then penetrates the bulging abdomen of the Arachnid with her ovipositor and lays all of her eggs inside the paralyzed creature. Once egg laying is completed the female wasp disengages herself from the spider and flies away to die.
Almost immediately the wasp eggs hatch inside and the little white larvae begin to consume the living internals of the spider. They continue to eat the fresh edibles until they metamorphosize into young adult wasps which chew their way out of the, now dead, husk of spider and fly away to seek a mate which in turn, once fertilized, will ultimately hunt yet another unfortunate spider to host the fearsome hatchlings of her own busy brood.
As I stacked the wood in the front alcove I paused for a few moments to ponder the miracle of life and death enacted, unsuspectedly, in the battleground of my back woodpile….and marveled at the absolute drama of it all.
M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ
20 August 2023
