#evaniid

[mushrooms-and-millipedes]

A blue-eyed ensign wasp (Evania appendigaster; Family: Evaniidae) I caught recently and pointed today.

Gorgeous!

[usgsbiml]

Cockroaches beware!.  Here is an Evaniid wasp, Ensign Wasp (the abdomen is a flag...get it?), possibly Hyptia harpyoides.  This group parasitizes cockroaches at least our native cockroaches.  Not sure if they find our indoor cockroaches acceptable.  

[drhoz]

#107 - Red-Chested Hatchet Wasp

I've never actually seen one of these wasps, before yesterday, but then there's only 400 or so species known. By a happy coincidence, the very first Google hit I got (via the Catalogue of Organisms blog) for the highly distinctive Ensign or Hatchet wasps had a red thorax. But since Hyptia is an Oklahoman genus, I'm reluctant to say it's the same species that became the first casualty of the inflatable pool I set up in the carport. Possibly it wanted to avoid the heatwave, too, but I fished her out in time.

Evania appendigaster Blue-eyed Hatchet Wasp. Pictured in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 2009, by Muhammad Mahdi Karim

As you can see from the photo above, they're very strange-looking wasps, with long legs, implausibly short wings, and a drastically compressed and undersized gaster that they swing up and down like a flag, or hatchet. Indeed, the Evaniidae used to be a wastebin taxon where any strange-looking parasitic wasps got put. The few (less than 20) that have actually been studied enough are all parasitoids of cockroach eggs, which means that Ensign Wasps are actually fairly common around houses, as they hunt for ootheca. The blue-eyed species in the photo, for example, is now worldwide, thanks to the success of its pest-species host.