Hind-legs like 1970s boot-cut jeans: new wasp discovered in Malta

An unnamed wasp species has been given its rightful place in the world of entomology after a Maltese researcher discovered it in Malta and had it sent to a scientist who had made a similar find in Sardinia.

Thomas Cassar is one of a group of researchers, which include David Mifsud and Cornelis van Achterberg, to document the discovery of the Gasteruption tanyakronum, a new species of wasp, in Malta.

The species had been collected recently on Sardinia, but had remained nameless and unknown, and it was awaiting description by the very expert Cassar had sent his own specimens to.

A gasteruptiid, by Cassar’s own description, is a peculiar wasp: very slim, “with a weird neck and hind legs like 1970s boot-cut jeans.”

The females have a very long tube poking out of their behind, known as an ovipositor, which is used to probe deep into the nest cells of solitary bees. Here they lay an egg, which hatches, and the wasp’s larva either eats the bee’s eggs and larvae or eats the bee’s nectar and pollen stores, or both, “because who says no to food if it’s free? You can see them flying around the flower-heads of fennel at this time of year,” Cassar said.

Cassar said that in summer of 2020 he was collecting specimens to send abroad, given that the gasteruptiids family of insects had never been studied locally. “I recall how on one sweltering July afternoon I was out sampling in Xemxija... a curious Russian tourist sidled up to me and asked me what I was doing. Without hesitation I told him ‘catching parasitoid wasps’ and promptly brandished a specimen tube at him... had that tourist known that in the very tube I had shown him lay a male individual of a brand new species to science, perhaps he would have been a bit more interested, but not even I knew that at the time.”