Velvet Ant

[guppiecat]

This is not an ant. It’s actually a type of wingless wasp.

A wasp, of course, is any insect of the suborder Apocrita that is neither a bee nor an ant.

The suborder Apocrita is made of all insects in the Hymenoptera that have a narrow “waist” (or petiole) formed between the first two segments of the actual abdomen.

This is where it gets fun …

A petiole is sometimes called a pedicel, which is also used for the second segment of an insect’s antennae, which can be confusing. So you’d think most entomologists would use “petiole”, but that gets confusing because that work can also mean the stalk at the base of the nests of paper wasps *and* the situation where a normally four-sided cell in the wing of an insect has only three.

Why did all of this happen? Because of plants. People were studying plants before they were studying bugs and in botany a pedicel is the thin stem that connects a single flower to the inflorescence (cluster of flowers) or to a single fruit to infructescence (cluster of fruits (or fruit-like things)) while a petiole is the thin stalk that connects a leaf to its stem.

Now let’s talk about figs …

Botanically, a fruit is the seed bearing structure in angiosperms that is formed from the ovary. Figs are false fruits, being formed from an inverted inflorescence that, when pollinated, grows into an infructescence. How does this get pollinated, I hear you ask? With wasps!

The fig’s inflorescence is inverted, so the only way they can get pollinated is with wasps that have evolved to match specific fig species. One wasp crawls into each flower, lays its eggs, and dies. The eggs hatch, and the little wasps chew their way out of the fig flower, leaving their mother’s body behind. Now, normally, people get grossed out at this point, as every fig they eat actually contains several wasps … but that’s not the cool part.

Because a fig is a cluster of little false fruits, each false fruit being connected to its infructescence with a pedicel *and* each one containing a wasp, which is distinguished from other insects of Hymenoptera because it has a pedicel, that means that figs, unlike all the other infructescences out there, has twice as many pedicels as you’d expect!

Ta da!

(This is what happens when a photographer who is both a word geek and bio geek isn’t quite tired enough to go to bed yet.)

Originally posted at stories.starmind.org.

Comments

[pauamma]

That's kinda awesome, as mildly gross things go. :-)

[pameladean]

I read portions of this to Eric, who promptly looked fig wasps up on Wikipedia. I was hoping they were very very small, since I don't plan to stop eating figs, and Wikipedia seems to have confirmed this.

The linguistic journey was lovely but good grief.

P.

[guppiecat]

Oh yes, fig wasps are quite wee.

There are a surprising number of eensy weensy bugs of which most people are unaware. I keep learning more about the weird world of tiny bugs with every macro photography book I read.

[pameladean]

I see some of them every summer because the cats can see them fine and are not actually chasing invisible objects. Some of these little guys are so very small they can fit through the mesh of the screen, though they never seem very happy about actually being in the house once they've done that.

I'm also forever looking at a bee or dragonfly on a flower and seeing that there are half a dozen very small beetles or aphids or flies or mites hanging out nearby.

P.