Wasp Wednesday Week 9: Scolia dubia dubia Say, 1837

This week marks the return of Wasp Wednesday, meaning we get to discuss another fun constituent of the order Hymenoptera! Up this week is Scolia dubia dubia, a common and conspicuous wasp that you can easily find in your garden or on a hike.

Taxonomy: This species is a member of the family Scoliidae, a group of over 550 species that are known to occur worldwide. These wasps are sometimes referred to as crinkle-winged wasps due to the appearance of their wings. There are approximately 20 North American species in this family, and recent taxonomic work has placed them into seven genera. The family was formerly placed in the superfamily Vespoidea, although recent molecular research suggests Scoliidae belongs in its own superfamily Scolioidea. Scolia dubia dubia is one subspecies of Scolia dubia, and is often referred to as the two-spotted scoliid wasp. The other subspecies, Scolia dubia haematodes, is found in western North America, especially in the southwest. This other subspecies has one of the most hardcore common names I’ve ever seen – the BLOOD-TAILED SCOLIID WASP!

Identification: Scoliid wasps are often conspicuous and easily noticed. Most species are between half an inch and an inch in length, although some tropical species can grow to two inches, with wingspans up to nearly 5 inches! The North American species are either yellow or red with black markings and dark wings. The family can be easily separated from most other wasps by examining the wings, which have many wrinkle-like ridges at the tips of their wings. Scolia dubia dubia is easily separated from other scoliids (and most other wasps) by the two yellow spots on the dorsal metasoma. If you look closely, you might notice that this wasp bears a close resemblance to a famous cartoon mouse – interestingly enough, they’ve been observed on iNaturalist at Universal Studios in Orlando, but not yet at Disney World!

Natural History: Scolia dubia dubia can be found throughout the eastern United States, although members of the family are widespread throughout all of North America as well as globally. The two-spotted scoliid wasp will collect nectar from flowers in the late summer and early fall. Scoliid wasps all hunt the grubs of scarab beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae), on which the females lay their eggs. Once larvae develop, they will enter the body of the host, feed, and overwinter until they mature. Scolia dubia dubia is known to hunt for grubs of the green June beetle, Cotinis nitida, and also may hunt the invasive Japanese beetle, Popilia japonica, which makes this species a key ally in the fight against invasive species in North America!

View This Taxon On: BugGuide | iNaturalist

You know those odd chunks of time you get, 45 minutes between zoom calls, for example, or the 30 minutes one has before getting kids at school? I now cherish those moments, as they’re just right for making improvements to course materials. Specifically, I am trying to upgrade my Insect Biodiversity and Evolution lab handouts. It’s been a long, slow transformation, with two main aims: (1) make them a bit more generic (i.e., less Pennsylvania-focused), and (2) to convert all the micrographs to line drawings. Take this incredible confocal laser scanning micrograph of a dipluran antenna:

It beautifully illustrates the musculature one can see in each dipluran antennal segment. That is, you can see one of the major traits that differs between insect and non-insect hexapods. But, oh man, does it ever burn through a ton of toner when we print it. It also doesn’t render well on the printed page, unless we go full color. What about this Imms classic, though (Fig. 3 in Imms 1939):

The line drawing effectively illustrates the same trait, in a simpler, more toner-friendly way. I’m bullish on line drawings again, and, thanks to the efforts of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and their partners, there are MANY of public domain line drawings available. You can find them in Flickr, where there are also links to the sources. Cruising the BHL’s photostream in my spare moments has been a fun hobby, one that undoubtedly will make my handouts better.

That said, I find myself frustrated that I cannot find the ideal line drawing for each of the taxa or characters I’m covering. The solution, of course, is to simply do them myself (I was a line illustrator once!), but with my schedule it’ll take a long time to complete that task. Maybe we should crowd-source these drawings. I.e., establish some sort of clearinghouse for creative commons or public domain line drawings. Something like University of Texas / Alex Wild’s Insects Unlocked (also on Flickr! Learn more on YouTube), where students could learn how to do line drawings and then share their creations.

We also need fresh interpretations of important characters and taxa. There’s a long history of resource-strapped entomologists reproducing each other’s drawings. Check out this drawing of a hydroptilid caddisfly by Needham, from 1902, for example:

And this line drawing of a hydroptilid caddisfly from Ward and Whipple (1918):

Clearly that is the same line drawing. In cruising through the BHL’s photostream it becomes quite clear that we have been reproducing the same handful of line drawings of insects ad nauseum. You can even see it above, in the dipluran antenna example (Imms drawing, reproduced by Ewing). Some of these original illustrations have been reproduced five or more times, and my own re-use of these illustrations isn’t improving the situation.

We need some fresh illustrations!

Once again we are hosting Hexapod Haiku Challenge, with entries due by May 15th. We resurrected the challenge last spring, after a seven-year hiatus. It was so much fun, and we had some really incredible entries. I can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with this year.

In the meantime, I’m re-listening to some older episodes of the Haiku Chronicles podcast. Episodes 2 (Bashō’s Frog) and 4 (History of American Haiku, part I, roots) are really helpful, in thinking about what is and is not a haiku. Listening to these discussions, with real haiku aficionados, helped me shape my own approach to poetry.

I also happen to be sorting spiders (see below), while listening, and I just heard Cor van den Heuvel read this amazing poem:

turning over the rock
quickly replacing it

Amazing! And so relevant to my upcoming field season. (More on that later.) It’s at 8:30 in Episode 1 – The Lost Tapes if you want to hear it read by one of the greats. It’s apparently from an unpublished manuscript called “The Sun Comes and Goes”.

I definitely feel a growing inspiration, with the weather heating up, the insects flying again … What inspires you to write haiku? We’d love to read them as part of this year’s Hexapod Haiku Challenge!