Tarantula Hawk

[Ranitomeya]

Went collecting in a canyon and caught a few tarantula hawks. Here's a male lapping up sugar solution from a q-tip. He's half the size of the largest female I captured.

I am most definitely not feeling brave enough to handle a large female whose stinger is long enough to pierce straight through my finger were it capable of going through bone.

 

[yen_saw]

Beautiful! Agree not to be stung by one, pain to the heart and worse than velvet ant.

 

[Mantis Man13]

You should wear gloves lol!

 

[dmina]

very cool... would like to see the size of the female... but not in your hand... Never seen one of those before... But then again, before this group.. I thought insects consisted of butterflies, moths, mosquitoes, bees, wasps, ants etc... never knowing there were some many different ones in each group..

Can you tell us more about them?

 

[Ranitomeya]

Tarantula hawks are a type of spider wasp and search for and capture live tarantulas in order to reproduce. The adults can be found around here feeding on fennel, milkweed, and buckwheat nectar.
Female tarantula hawks are known to have extremely painful stings with very, very long stingers. Like all spider wasps, they use their stinger to inject a paralytic venom into spiders. In the case of tarantula hawks, they go after tarantulas and then drag the living, but paralyzed prey into a hole and lay a single egg before covering the hole up. When the egg hatches, the larva burrows into the still-living tarantula and slowly eats it alive until it grows to such a size that feeding without killing the tarantula is no longer possible. By the end of their larval stage, the tarantula is a collection of empty exoskeleton. Each tarantula hawk represents a tarantula that has been hunted down, paralyzed, and then eaten alive slowly.

Here are four females and one male. I'm not sure if I have tarantula hawks belonging to just the genus Pepsis or if I have some that are in Hemipepsis. Hemipepsis are supposed to be smaller, but I believe the smaller individuals I've captured are simply individuals that were provisioned with smaller tarantulas and the larger individuals were provisioned with much larger tarantulas. Although I'm not sure whether I have one or two genuses, I can tell that there are at least two different species here based on the presence of a dark band near the end of the wings and the lack of it on the others.



Here's a large female and the small male that I was feeding on my hand.

 

[dmina]

Oh my gosh.... they are big... and very interesting.. (but definitely not for me) Thank you for taking the time to write about it... I wouldn't have googled it... but I did come back to read what you said about them... Thanks... and today, I learned something new... You have 5 tarantula assassins there ... do they need an adult to lay their eggs in? or can it be a baby? Wow "spider wasps"

 

[Ranitomeya]

They will use both juveniles and adult tarantulas to lay their eggs on, but adult tarantulas usually produce bigger wasps. It's believed that females will choose to lay eggs destined to become males on smaller tarantulas and eggs destined to become females on larger tarantulas because larger females are more capable of successfully subduing tarantulas and males do not need to be a large size in order to mate with females.

 

[dmina]

They have that "survival of the fittest" down pat! Thanks that was interesting...

 

[CosbyArt]

Those are some huge wasps! I like them better than the parasitic wasp (Podagrion sp) that infect mantis ooths, but if I kept tarantulas I doubt I would like them either though Very interesting though, and thanks for the photos and information.

 

[Ranitomeya]

Here's me feeding the large female. She wasn't acting defensive and was licking moisture off my hands, so I decided to try feeding her.

 

[dmina]

oh my aren't you the courageous one... looks like you are really daring.. but maybe by now she knows you are not to be feared.

Great pic... thanks for updating us.

 

[Ranitomeya]

Like any animal, they'll let you know when they feel threatened and don't want to be touched. You just have to learn to recognize their body language and then it's easy to know whether or not you can proceed. That said, animals can always be unpredictable and they'll quickly change in behavior if they experience stimuli that disturbs them. I will admit my hands were sweating a little when she was on me.

I caught her in a good mood today and she wasn't feeling threatened. Normally she would start buzzing in agitation and hunching over with her abdomen aimed forward and ready to sting, but today she just wanted to crawl around and drink sugar water.

 

[CosbyArt]

I'd been sweating too, nicely done - you both walked away.