Blue Mud Dauber

Blue Mud Dauber

I saw an article yesterday on Arstechnica about parasitic wasps. It’s a pretty cool article, check it out:
Parasitic wasp genome offers chance to study sex and death

It made me remember this picture I took, of a blue mud dauber. I think the species is called Chalybion californicum, but I’m not sure.

They make little tunnels of mud, one line at the time. When I was little, I enjoyed following them to their mud source, and then back to where they were building the tunnel, and I was always very impressed by the amount of effort they put into that.

They seem to be very picky about the spiders that they choose for their babies to eat. Just any old spider won’t do. They hunt looking for specific species and specific sizes.

Very interesting wasps altogether, and beautiful too.

Creative Commons License
Blue Mud Dauber by The Bug Lady, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Tags: , , ,

2 Responses to “Blue Mud Dauber”

  1. Oroboros says:
    January 16, 2010 at 20:41

    I think I could go back to school and spend the rest of my life studying wasps. I’m a regular Ars Technica reader and somehow missed that story, so thanks! I found you off Ugly Overload BTW.

    From Carl Zimmer’s Parasite Rex:

    The viruses of parasitic wasps are stranger still. The wasps are born with the virus’s genetic code scattered across many of their chromosomes. In males the instructions stay in this scattered form. But as soon as a female begins to take its adult form in her pupa, the virus awakens. In certain cells of her ovary, the pieces of the virus’s genome are cut out of the wasp DNA and sewn together, like chapters assembled into a complete viral book. These genes then direct the formation of actual viruses – strands of DNA encased in a protein shell, in other words – and these viruses begin to load up inside the nucleus of the ovary cell. When the nucleus is filled to capacity, the entire cell bursts open, and millions of the viruses float free in the wasp’s ovary.

    But they don’t make a female wasp sick. The wasp actually uses them as a weapon against the tobacco hornworm. When it injects the viruses into a caterpillar along with her eggs, the viruses start invading the host’s cells in a matter of minutes. They commandeer the host’s DNA, forcing the cells to make strange new proteins normally never seen inside a hornworm, which flood the body cavity of the caterpillar. These proteins destroy the hornworm’s immune system. The cells start sticking to one another, instead of to the parasites, and then they burst open. The host is left as immunologically helpless as a person with full-blown AIDS (which is also caused by a virus that blows apart immune cells). Thanks to the virus, the wasp eggs can hatch and begin to grow without any harassment by their host.

    Reply
  2. dms says:
    January 17, 2010 at 22:58

    Arstechnica is pretty awesome indeed. And so are wasps. Cool extract, sorry about trimming it, it was way too long for a comment.

    Reply

Leave a Reply