by Nancy Power, Ph.D. Candidate
Today (Feb. 28, 2019) I got to name the species of tiny wasp (less than 1 mm long) that I have been working with for over 2 years! I thereby participated in the long history of humans naming the other creatures on earth. As long as 4000 years ago Hebrew people saw the naming of creatures as a command from God, as told in the story of Adam and Eve. Nowadays, usually the taxonomist who describes a new species gets to name it, but Dr. Serguei Triapitsyn, the taxonomist describing my species, gave me the honor. The wasp was already known to be in the genus Ooencyrtus, so I just needed to come up with a species name. My colleague Fatemeh Ganjisaffar suggested I name it after some feature unique to this wasp. I thought about using the Latin for “yellow belly,” but some other Ooencyrtus species also have yellow bellies, and in Google Translate it came out to “ventrem luteum” or “flavo uterus,” both of which are too long. When I taught high school biology in a previous career, I cursed the biologists that assigned complex names that confused my students, so I wanted a simple name. I then looked up “amazing” and saw that it translated in Latin to mirus, which also means “remarkable.” It was short, went well with “Ooencyrtus,” was easy to pronounce, and represented the word I most associate with my wasp species. I knew I had found the name I wanted. I checked the on-line Universal Chalcidoidea Database to make sure no other Ooencyrtus species bore the same species name, and then e-mailed my choice to Dr. Triapitsyn. We will “describe” the new species by measuring body parts, taking photos under the microscope, and sequencing its DNA, and then publish the results in a taxonomic journal. Only then will the name be official, but I will use it here since this is an unofficial blog.
Today (Feb. 28, 2019) I got to name the species of tiny wasp (less than 1 mm long) that I have been working with for over 2 years! I thereby participated in the long history of humans naming the other creatures on earth. As long as 4000 years ago Hebrew people saw the naming of creatures as a command from God, as told in the story of Adam and Eve. Nowadays, usually the taxonomist who describes a new species gets to name it, but Dr. Serguei Triapitsyn, the taxonomist describing my species, gave me the honor. The wasp was already known to be in the genus Ooencyrtus, so I just needed to come up with a species name. My colleague Fatemeh Ganjisaffar suggested I name it after some feature unique to this wasp. I thought about using the Latin for “yellow belly,” but some other Ooencyrtus species also have yellow bellies, and in Google Translate it came out to “ventrem luteum” or “flavo uterus,” both of which are too long. When I taught high school biology in a previous career, I cursed the biologists that assigned complex names that confused my students, so I wanted a simple name. I then looked up “amazing” and saw that it translated in Latin to mirus, which also means “remarkable.” It was short, went well with “Ooencyrtus,” was easy to pronounce, and represented the word I most associate with my wasp species. I knew I had found the name I wanted. I checked the on-line Universal Chalcidoidea Database to make sure no other Ooencyrtus species bore the same species name, and then e-mailed my choice to Dr. Triapitsyn. We will “describe” the new species by measuring body parts, taking photos under the microscope, and sequencing its DNA, and then publish the results in a taxonomic journal. Only then will the name be official, but I will use it here since this is an unofficial blog.
You may wonder, “How can a wasp be amazing and remarkable?” Let me count the ways . . .
1. O. mirus is less than 1 mm long, yet it has 4 wings, 6 legs, eyes, a brain, digestive and reproductive systems, etc. It can perform complex behaviors, like determining how many eggs to lay based on the size of the host species’ egg.
2. Most of the individuals are females, and they do not need males in order to reproduce. They do not mate even if a male shows up and initiates a courtship ritual. A male approaches a female head-on, waving his antennae into the female’s antennae. She waves back for a second, and then turns around and walks away . I feel bad for the males, doomed to eternal unrequited love! The males seem to be an artefact from an earlier time in the species’ evolutionary history when mating was needed for reproduction.
3. Oddly, a type of bacteria called “Wolbachia” is responsible for making the wasps mostly female. I can kill the Wolbachia by feeding the wasp antibiotic-laced honey, or by keeping the wasps at 97°F (= 36°C). Without the Wolbachia, the second generation is 100% males. That ends that experiment, because the males cannot reproduce!
4. The adult female wasps usually lay only one egg into a host bagrada bug egg, with a tail sticking out from the wasp egg through the outside shell of the host egg, as an air tube for the baby wasp. The parent wasp probably injects some venom, too, because I have only seen one case in about 5,000 parasitized host eggs where the host survived and a baby bug emerged. (In entomology, “bug” refers to a specific group of insects.) Normally even if no wasp emerges, no bug emerges, either. The wasp egg hatches inside the host egg and the baby wasp spends its whole childhood in there, consuming the host egg, as if in a small, external womb. After a few weeks, it pupates into an adult and chews its way out of the host egg shell. The wasp is especially cute at this point, because the antennae pop out first and start waving in the air, and then the head slowly appears, and then the rest of the body, over about an hour’s time.
5. When I kept parasitized eggs at 57° or 61°F for a couple of months, no wasps emerged. However, when I transferred the same eggs to 79°F, wasps emerged 10 days later, instead of the usual 14 days at 79°F. Thus it looks like the wasps develop into larvae even at the cooler temperatures, but then they stop and wait until the temperature is more to their liking.
6. Even though bagrada bug appears to be its main host, my wasp was able to reproduce successfully on the eggs of 9 other species of bugs and one species of moth, the corn earworm. The only species I tried on which O. mirus did not succeed was the carob moth, probably because the moth eggs were too small.
7. Last but not least, O. mirus is easy to rear and to work with. Our colony has gone through about 44 generations in Quarantine at UCR since we first received them from Pakistan in January, 2016, and, knock on wood, we have not had any diseases or problems.
For these and many other reasons, I am proud to introduce to you my “baby,” Ooencyrtus mirus !
1. O. mirus is less than 1 mm long, yet it has 4 wings, 6 legs, eyes, a brain, digestive and reproductive systems, etc. It can perform complex behaviors, like determining how many eggs to lay based on the size of the host species’ egg.
2. Most of the individuals are females, and they do not need males in order to reproduce. They do not mate even if a male shows up and initiates a courtship ritual. A male approaches a female head-on, waving his antennae into the female’s antennae. She waves back for a second, and then turns around and walks away . I feel bad for the males, doomed to eternal unrequited love! The males seem to be an artefact from an earlier time in the species’ evolutionary history when mating was needed for reproduction.
3. Oddly, a type of bacteria called “Wolbachia” is responsible for making the wasps mostly female. I can kill the Wolbachia by feeding the wasp antibiotic-laced honey, or by keeping the wasps at 97°F (= 36°C). Without the Wolbachia, the second generation is 100% males. That ends that experiment, because the males cannot reproduce!
4. The adult female wasps usually lay only one egg into a host bagrada bug egg, with a tail sticking out from the wasp egg through the outside shell of the host egg, as an air tube for the baby wasp. The parent wasp probably injects some venom, too, because I have only seen one case in about 5,000 parasitized host eggs where the host survived and a baby bug emerged. (In entomology, “bug” refers to a specific group of insects.) Normally even if no wasp emerges, no bug emerges, either. The wasp egg hatches inside the host egg and the baby wasp spends its whole childhood in there, consuming the host egg, as if in a small, external womb. After a few weeks, it pupates into an adult and chews its way out of the host egg shell. The wasp is especially cute at this point, because the antennae pop out first and start waving in the air, and then the head slowly appears, and then the rest of the body, over about an hour’s time.
5. When I kept parasitized eggs at 57° or 61°F for a couple of months, no wasps emerged. However, when I transferred the same eggs to 79°F, wasps emerged 10 days later, instead of the usual 14 days at 79°F. Thus it looks like the wasps develop into larvae even at the cooler temperatures, but then they stop and wait until the temperature is more to their liking.
6. Even though bagrada bug appears to be its main host, my wasp was able to reproduce successfully on the eggs of 9 other species of bugs and one species of moth, the corn earworm. The only species I tried on which O. mirus did not succeed was the carob moth, probably because the moth eggs were too small.
7. Last but not least, O. mirus is easy to rear and to work with. Our colony has gone through about 44 generations in Quarantine at UCR since we first received them from Pakistan in January, 2016, and, knock on wood, we have not had any diseases or problems.
For these and many other reasons, I am proud to introduce to you my “baby,” Ooencyrtus mirus !