Mummy-Making Wasps Discovered in Ecuador

A band of 24 new species of mummy-making wasps was recently discovered in Ecuador by a team of scientists, who published their findings in the journal ZooKeys.

Fieldwork in the cloud forests of Ecuador by professor Scott Shaw and colleagues, of the University of Wyoming, Laramie, brought these new unique species to light.

Among the 24 new insect species described, several were named after famous celebrities, including the comedians and television hosts Jimmy Fallon, John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Ellen DeGeneres, as well as the Ecuadorian artist Eduardo Kingman, American poet Robert Frost, and Colombian singer and musician, Shakira.

The Shakira wasp causes its host caterpillar to bend and twist in such a way that it reminded researchers of the "Hips Don't Lie" singer/belly-dancer.

"These wasps are very small organisms, being only 4 to 9 millimeters long, but they have an enormous impact on forest ecology," Shaw commented in a news release.

Female Aleiodes wasps may be small, but caterpillars beware. Female wasps prey on a particular kind of caterpillar and inject their eggs into it. This type of parasitism does not immediately kill the caterpillar, but eventually the wasp larva hatch and then feed on the caterpillar's body. This causes the host caterpillar to shrink and mummify, allowing the immature wasp to make a cocoon inside the mummified remains of its conquered prey.

When the baby wasp is fully developed, it burrows a hole through the caterpillar and flies away to mate, just to begin to horrid cycle all over again.

"Killing and mummifying caterpillars may sound bad, but these are actually highly beneficial insects," Shaw contends. "These wasps are helping to naturally control the populations of plant-feeding caterpillars, so they help to sustain the biodiversity of tropical forests."

News of this unusually cruel wasp species comes just in the wake of the recently discovered - and very similar - soul-sucking Ampulex dementor wasp species, named for the terrifying hooded figures known as dementors from J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series.