Grasshopper hunter!

Click on the photo above to enlarge it. You will see that the red and black wasp is carrying a grasshopper about twice its size. The wasp seems perfectly built for this job; its mandibles hold the grasshopper's antennae and its two pairs of front legs are wrapped around the grasshopper as if in an embrace. The wasp's rear legs are long enough to straddle the grasshopper and keep walking.

Why would a wasp carry a grasshopper, you might ask? And why is the much larger grasshopper putting up with this? The unfortunate grasshopper is about to become a stored food supply for the wasp's future offspring. Mother wasp has probably already delivered a few paralyzing stings. She will carry the grasshopper to a nice sandy spot, dig a hole, drag the grasshopper underground, lay an egg on it, and then refill the hole. When the egg hatches the newborn wasp larva will be sitting on the delicious grasshopper that its mother caught for it.

It's a Prionyx wasp. They raise their babies on a strict grasshopper-only diet. The drama above occurred last September on a sandy path in the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in Oceanville, New Jersey. This September I saw a lot more of them by a parking lot at the foot of the Verrazano Bridge to Assateague Island, Mayland. The  one pictured below was digging a hole in the sandy soil below a row of bushes at the edge of the parking lot. There were about a dozen wasps nearby, all digging holes or dragging grasshoppers from the leaves under the bushes to the sandy strip of waiting holes.

The bushes above were full of unsuspecting grasshoppers, flying and jumping -- a buffet for Prionyx wasps!

Fennel time!

Fennel, Foeniculum vulgare 

A handful of crushed fennel leaves smells deliciously of celery and licorice. 

There is a little patch of fennel among the flowers growing on the extension of Middagh Street that passes over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway near my home. The plant is tall with pretty feather-like foliage. Its tiny yellow flowers are borne in little bouquets that are technically called compound umbels, like the flowers of parsley and carrots.  Fennel is one of the main flavors in the cordial Absinthe, and it is used in herbal medicine too. The seeds are used as a spice, and some of us eat fennel bulbs and leaves as a vegetable. 

But we are not the only ones who like fennel. Wasps love it! 

On a sunny day a seemingly endless parade of exotic looking insects visits fennel blossoms, each more elegant that the last: thread-waisted wasps, potter wasps, mud dauber wasps, a good compliment of honeybees and bumble bees, and lots of fancy flies come in for a tasty sip of fennel nectar. 

Here are photos of a few recent visitors.

Isodontia elegans -- a "grass-carrying" wasp. 

They got the common name "grass-carrying" because they incorporate grass into their nests. 

Another Isodontia species. 

Polistes dominula -- the reviled European Paper Wasp. 

The European paper wasp is a relative new comer to the United States, introduced from Europe and first recorded in the northeastern United States in the 1980s. It has already gained a bad reputation as a cranky wasp that becomes aggressive toward humans with very little provocation. 

Sceliphron ceamentarium -- a black and yellow mud dauber wasp. 

Eumenes fraternus -- a potter wasp.

Visit this link to see how the potter wasp uses that fancy tail end to build a pot-shaped nest out of mud: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYMN_FXoXFk

There is more information about urban insects in my book,  Field Guide to Urban Wildlife, which will be published by Stackpole Books in spring 2011.