Spider Hunting Wasp (2/5)

Hymenoptera: Pompilidae

Heterodontonyx bicolor  

I don't know what happened down this hole, but something did.

For several minutes I had been watching a Spider Hunting Wasp meandering around, going in and out of holes she found, and now she entered this one.

Suddenly she was trying to back out, her legs propped against each side of the entrance, levering herself backwards. Only her rear half protruded. Was she trying to pull something out, or was she being pulled in and struggling for her life? I didn't know.

She curled her abdomen beneath her, perhaps intending to use the sting at the tail against the foe if she could get it around, but the hole was too small to allow it.

The struggle continued, the wasp's feet slipping on the loose soil at the entrance. Soon, feet dragging, she disappeared into the hole. Something inside the hole, more powerful or with more leverage, had pulled her in.

I waited, breath bated. A minute later, two minutes perhaps, I wasn't timing it, her head emerged and there she stopped. Her head out of the hole but resting on the ground as shown in the photograph. She remained perfectly still, I thought she might be dead, for some time, and then her feelers moved a little. They moved a bit more. She wasn't dead.

Eventually she emerged from the hole completely. She staggered around near it for a minute and then her movements became more normal and she wandered further afield before returning to the same hole and going back inside.

I waited again.

Ten minutes passed. Twenty minutes passed. Now thirty minutes had passed. There was no sign of movement and it was time for me to head back to Melbourne.

I set off for the car and returtned after twenty metres just to check again. Nothing.

Assuming that my wasp had had a confrontation in that hole with a spider, did she go back for round two? Was she dead or paralysed? Were both parties either dead or paralysed? Was she busy preparing a paralysed spider for transport by biting its legs off to facilitate easier carriage to a burrow already dug nearby? Or was she in there laying an egg on a paralysed spider with no intention of moving it? Were they both in there watching television. Was there even a spider or was it all just my imagination?

I'll never know what happened in that hole, but we all know now that my life is so exciting, a wasp can entertain me for an hour.