#pleistodontes

[addicted2wasps]

Pleistodontes froggatti!♀️ Coloured pencils.

Only 3 wasps left to draw! I'm almost done! Woohoo!

[addicted2wasps]

Agaonids are so weird, but awesome! Pleistodontes sp. (Male on left, female on right).

(a.k.a. fig wasps)

[drhoz]

This is a male Pleistodontes imperialis, the polinator wasp of Ficus rubiginosa, which is endemic to eastern Australia.

And is known as the Port Jackson Fig. After making the hole he’ll mate with her.

[drhoz]

This is a male Pleistodontes imperialis, the pollinator species of Ficus rubiginosa. Male pollinating fig wasps mate with the females through a small hole they chew in the gall that contains a female. Their genitalia, aedeagus, is thus extremely large for their size and is almost prehensile in the way it can be moved.

Pleistodontes froggatti was originally mistaken for this species, by Australian entomologist W.W. Froggatt - it was redescribed and named after him, five years later, by Austrian entomologist Gustav Mayr.

[drhoz]

#1135 - Pleistodontes frogatti - Moreton Bag Fig Wasp

Dacre England posted this to Facebook, asking for an ID of this tiny wasp on a Moreton Bay Fig. It is, perhaps not surprisingly, a Moreton Bay Fig Wasp.

The Agaonidae are tiny wasps that reproduce inside figs. This is awkward, since fig flowers are inside the fruit. Some fig wasps cheat, and have very long ovipositors so they can inject their eggs into the ovaries of the fig flowers, without having to enter the fig themselves. This is no good for the fig, since their flowers won’t get pollinated that way. The rest of the fig wasps have a more mutually satisfactory arrangement, for certain values of satisfactory.

In these species - such as the one in the photo above, a fertilised female will seek out the tiny hole at one end of the unripe fig, and force her way in, using her long flattened head with backwards-pointing teeth as a wedge. It will be a one way trip, since she’ll probably break off her antennae and wings in the attempt. But that doesn’t matter, since she was never intending to leave again anyway. 

The inside of the fig is lined with two kinds of flowers -- some long, and some short. Her ovipositor is only long enough to reach the ovaries of the short ones, and she’ll lay her eggs in those. But as she wanders around, she’ll be pollinating all the flowers with pollen collected in the fig she was born in.

The flowers, fig, and eggs begin to develop, after the mother wasp dies of exhaustion and old age. The males hatch first, white and wingless, and in some species engage in murderous battles with their brothers until only one remains to impregnate all his sisters in a pitch-black incestuous orgy. That accomplished, he’ll chew an exit hole for his gravid sisters, and they’ll fly off to start the whole thing over again.

Of course, some figs have gotten sneaky too - in those Ficus species where the male flowers are borne on different plants to the females, the female figs look and smell identical to the male figs, but any fig wasp entering them finds it impossible to actually reach the ovaries, and will die there after blundering around depositing all the pollen she collected from the male fig she grew up in. Any fig wasp that found a male fig will be overjoyed, since her ovipositor will be long enough to reach all the ovaries in that one. But half her daughters are destined for a big disappointment.

Fig Wasps and their host figs have developed very complicated relations and diversity. Many species of fig wasp rely on a single species of fig, and vice versa, but the existence of the cheating fig wasps, and other wasps that parasitise the fig or the growing fig wasps, greatly complicates matters.

Oh, and you needed worry too much about the domestic fig, if you’re squeamish - the most common fig varieties are self-fertilising. Others, such as the Smyrna type, require nearby plantings of another variety - the caprifig - in which fig wasps will breed, and transfer enough pollen to the Smyrna fig to trigger fruit development.