Tarantula Hawk Bags Tarantula!

Hugh and I had just loaded the recycling into the truck this evening when he suddenly noticed and became very excited about something in the driveway. When I looked over, I thought at first that it was a hummingbird catching or being caught by something, but it was instead this giant bug walking backwards and dragging this tarantula along with it. I know now that the insect is a tarantula hawk, and Wikipedia has some fascinating things to say about them:

During the spiders's reproductive season male tarantulas are usually emaciated from ignoring food while searching for females. The tarantula hawks thus prefer female tarantulas and seek them in their burrows. They capture, sting, and paralyze the spider, then they either drag the spider back into her own burrow or transport their prey to a specially prepared nest where a single egg is laid on the spider's body, and the entrance is covered. The wasp larva, upon hatching, begins to suck the juices from the still-living spider. After the larva grows a bit, it plunges into the spider's body and feeds voraciously, avoiding vital organs for as long as possible to keep it fresh. The adult wasp emerges from the nest to continue the life cycle.


These wasps are relatively docile for a wasp and rarely sting without provocation though the sting, particularly of Pepsis Formosa, among the most painful of any insect. Commenting on his own experience, one researcher described the pain as "…immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down one's ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in these situations." In terms of scale, the wasp's sting is rated near the top of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, second only to that of the bullet ant and is described by Schmidt as "blinding, fierce [and] shockingly electric". Because of their extremely large stingers, very few animals are able to eat them; one of the few animals that can is the roadrunner.


I believe that this is the mysterious and tantalizing purple and gold giant insect that I have been seeing flying around here, and which I've been trying to photograph, for the last five years. Except I haven't seen it that often, and I think only once before have I gotten a snap of it at all. Victory is mine! Though sadly, victory is not the tarantula's.