Male masons wasps don’t have stings, but their spiky genitals can deliver a painful blow to any predators that try to eat them.
at Kobe University, Japan, says his team decided to explore whether the spikes were instead used for defence after his colleague Misaki Tsujii was “stung” by a male mason wasp, even though the males have no actual sting.“The male wasp used a pair of sharp spines in the genitalia to pierce her finger,” says Sugiura. “Surprisingly, the male ‘sting’ caused a pricking pain. I hypothesised that the male genitalia ofThe team placed single male wasps in a container with either a tree frog .
The wasps were frequently observed to pierce the mouth or face of frogs with their genitalia while being attacked. In another test, tree frogs were put in a container with male wasps that had been castrated with forceps, and they all ate the wasps.“Because wasps and bees evolved venomous stings from ovipositors [the tube used to lay eggs], their males, which lack ovipositors, were believed harmless.
When female wasps were tested instead, all of the pond frogs ate them, but 87.5 per cent of the tree frogs rejected them, showing that their stings are more effective than the male genital defences. The “sting” of male wasps had been documented before, scoring a level of 1 on the Schmidt sting pain index, compared with 1.5 for female stings. But this research was the first to use real predators to test the spines’ purpose.
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