100 More Species #29 Gorytina wasp

Gorytina wasp, Family Crabronidae, Subtribe Gorytina

Gory Tina? Surely someone has a friend named Tina who will be utterly thrilled to learn of this obscure taxon of wasp! Frankly, I don't even know if it's pronounced that way, but I can't say it any other way. Wouldn't it be great if the Gory Tina wasp had some awful life cycle that involved some helpless creature being consumed from the inside out?

Well of course it does, it's a wasp! Many if not most wasp species feed their young living and paralyzed prey. Each group of wasps specializes on a different group of prey animals--remember the great golden digger wasp uses only katydids, for example. The gorytina wasp is a much smaller insect, so it requires smaller provisions for its larva: treehoppers.

Thanks to Jenn Forman Orth for introducing me to a new virtual community of bug-identifiers, and to Doug Yanega, whose elegant ID read thus: "this is a Gorytine Crabronid. They eat treehoppers."

100 More Species #30: Onion

Onion Allium cepa

The onion is a familiar cultivated bulb used as a vegetable and seasoning for at least 5000 years. It was one of the first plants put in the New England soil by European colonists (despite the fact that useful native relatives already flourished). The plant has made it into nearly every cuisine on earth.

Our bag of onions was neglected and began to sprout. I took the most sprouted ones and put them in front of the kitchen window to photosynthesize. Alexis took a few of these and planted them in the cinderblock holes of our raised garden. Soon enough, the green scapes were so tall they pushed through the bird netting resting on the three foot fence posts supporting it.


Alexis holds The Pups in front of the towering onion scapes.

Once the top of the scapes pushed through the bird mesh, the buds opened into big clusters of white flowers, which were favorites among the small wasp mimic hover flies.