Chinese masks wasp nest with dead ants Bashny.Net

To protect offspring from attack, wasp Deuteragenia ossarium satisfied at the entrance of the nest special chamber that fills with dead ants.

The word ossuary (Russian equivalent – the ossuary) means the storage of skeletal remains. It can be a box, drawer or a whole room like a famous for the Sedlec ossuary in the Czech Republic. Usually ossuaries are created for some religious purposes, or reburial of the remains.





But OSU Deuteragenia ossarium difficult to suspect that it is guided by considerations of a religious character – however, it creates the real store for ant bodies, combined with the nest for the larvae. Opened it Michael Staff (Michael Staab), together with colleagues from Freiburg University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. D. ossarium lives in forests in Eastern China, and their nests it suits in natural cavities in plants.

Finding some tree oblong tunnel, the wasp makes several cameras, following each other, each of which leaves the egg. Partitions between the chambers are molded from particles of soil, resins and residues of plants, sometimes they come across pieces of insects. Such a way to make a nest for the development of the larvae is quite common for many OS.

However, D. ossarium "living" chamber with eggs complements another, which fills the remains of ants (hence its species name ossarium, reminiscent of ossuaries). Ants don't need for rearing of larvae, for this purpose, the OCA produces spiders. Why she collects the bodies, zoologists realized this when I discovered that the camera always with ants outside the nest, that is, serves as a threshold.

It is known that ants after death smell for quite a long time and the smell makes otvorachivanie other ants to dead ants away from the nest. Obviously, wasps are satisfied with the vault of ant remains at the entrance to the nest to protect the offspring from attack. In an article in PLOS ONE, the authors write that the ossuaries wasp most often come across ants Pachycondyla astuta – ordinary and at the same time quite aggressive species living in the same place where the wasp.

Although no one saw the wasp fills preddverno camera ants, zoologists believe that it is specifically after them – the bodies are usually in pretty good condition, and it suggests that OSA is hardly just collects the dead insects.

Source: nkj.ru