Favorite parasitoid wasp?
Trissolcus japonicus!!!! (Samurai wasp)
It was the first parasitoid I ever found and what led me down the rabbit hole. I just thought she was the cutest little gal ever…and they introduced me to the concept of classical biological control—importing a natural enemy to combat an invasive species. As this fellas name would suggest, it’s native to Japan (and China and South Korea), but it’s currently established in the U.S. including where I live (Texas.) Let me tell you why that’s a good thing.
T. japonicus parasitizes brown marmorated stink bug eggs, another species from Asia which is highly invasive and devastates crops and forests here. T. japonicus also, like many parasites and parasitoids, has a strong preference for its host! It doesn’t really attack native species that much.
Importing little parasites and parasitoids is actually a highly successful pest control strategy. There are of course a lot of high profile instances of “biological pest control gone wrong”, like that idiot that brought Cane Toads into Australia thinking they would eat locusts. But that guy did NO experiments to see if they even LIKE locusts (they don’t.) And he was using a PREDATOR (which usually doesn’t coevolve with a specific species and eats whatever it can gets its hands on.) So Cane Toads were brought to a place where they have no natural enemies and they bred like crazy eating every native bug in sight. And Australia is a worse place for it.
But when biological pest control is done by researchers who know what they are doing, it’s pretty damn successful. Its been used to combat so many devastating invasives in the U.S. (Cottony Cushion Scale, Spongey Moth, etc…) But the success stories don’t make headlines as often.
Funny story, T. japonicus actually wasn’t imported here on purpose. People in the U.S. were doing research on this little wasp to see if it was a good candidate for classical biological control (make sure it doesn’t parasitize anything native.) It was looking promising…but then wild populations of it were found here. Turns out they ended up getting into the U.S. somehow years prior to the research. But they’ve been doing pretty well and don’t really go after natives so it all shook out I guess.
