A bee in your bonnet has nothing on a wasp in your belly.
Mississippi scientists have discovered a new species of wasp that lays eggs in living flies so the babies burst out of their bellies, Nature reports.
“At the time we didn’t think it was real,” the study’s lead author Logan Moore, a biologist at Mississippi State University, told Live Science.
The females of this interspecies infiltrator, dubbed syntretus perlmani, reproduce by driving their hypodermic-like ovipositor— the stinger in stinging wasps — into a fruit fly’s abdomen to deposit its eggs.
This embryo then hatches into a tiny spiky-tailed larva, which develops inside the still-living host for about 18 days before erupting out the side of its abdomen, inducing a fatal stomachache.
“Just to add an additional layer of horror, the fly will normally remain alive for several hours after that,” said Moore. The wasp’s grisly manner of reproduction has earned it comparisons to the xenomorphs in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror classic “Alien.”
These fruit fly invaders are considered parasitoids rather than parasites because they always kill their hosts unlike the latter, which generally leave them alive.
Perlmani, which is the only known species of wasp to infect fruit flies, was first discovered last year in a Mississippi backyard by scientists collecting a type of fruit fly called drosophila affinis. They were reportedly checking them for parasitic worms called nematodes.
Moore initially couldn’t believe his eyes, saying: “If you dissect thousands of flies, you will see some things that are strange and odd, and you’ll never see them again,” exclaimed the researcher.
After collecting several of wasp larvae, his team confirmed their identity by raising them in a lab and studying their DNA.
Upon arrival at their new digs, the babies reportedly departed their host’s bodies and burrowed into the provided substrate, where they remained for 23 days before emerging as fully-developed adult wasps.
Meanwhile, subsequent research found that the wasps infected other species of fruit fly as well.
While this parasitic pregnancy might seem like a horrible way to die, this discovery is perhaps a boon for people concerned about their produce.
As their name suggests, fruit flies love to prey on ripened fruits or vegetables and often continue breeding in drains, garbage disposals, and empty bottles, making it tricky to evict them from the kitchen.
Although not technically dangerous, they’re considered a huge nuisance and can be a sign of unsanitary conditions.
“Almost everybody in the world has had some sort of interaction with this fly, usually not in a good context,” observed Moore.
Why did it take so long to discover something that infects such a common household pest?
Moore theorized: “I would say maybe the one thing that would explain why it’s gone undiscovered for so long is because nobody is expecting it. No parasitoid wasp has been known to infect the adult stage of not just Drosophila, but of flies in general.”
He claimed that its existence leaves us “wondering what else is out there on our doormat right now.”
Conservative estimates suggest that there are between between 500,000 and 1 million species of parasitoid wasps worldwide.
Among the most famous is tarantula hawk, a sparrow-sized wasp that resides in the American Southwest and is known for paralyzing and impregnating its arachnid namesake.
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