Hi all, long time lurker-first time poster.
I've been collecting and raising Tarantulas and other arachnids for more than a decade now. I have a female rose hair in a terrarium on my desk at the movie studio where I work.
The other morning I came in to work to find a Pepsis wasp in a clear plastic drink cup sitting on my computer's keyboard. One of the studio's electricians found it in the main parking lot around dusk and caught it. From the coloring it appeared to be a Pepsis formosa but that's just a semi educated guess.
It appeared to be in good health but I could not see a stinger. I have seen tarantula hawk wasps at my sister's house in Sedona AZ and even had a dead specimen in my collection for some time. All had very visible, very scary looking stingers sticking out of the end of their abdomens.
This wasp had nothing. I didn't want to harm it but I did shake the cup it was enclosed in a bit to see if I could rile it enough to perhaps reveal a stinger. My thinking was that it might be drawn up inside the body in some manner.
Although it opened and closed its mandibles several times at me it never revealed a stinger, not once. I eventually released it in the park behind my building at the studio.
Hence my question, do male Pepsis wasps perhaps have no stingers? I can see where they wouldn't need them, they don't sting spiders and lay eggs like the females do and you can make an argument that their color and appearance alone would scare off most predators, so they don't really need them.
I could find no answer in the on-line literature. Nothing about the males being any different than the females could be found either way. Does anybody here know the answer?
Thanks in advance.
I've been collecting and raising Tarantulas and other arachnids for more than a decade now. I have a female rose hair in a terrarium on my desk at the movie studio where I work.
The other morning I came in to work to find a Pepsis wasp in a clear plastic drink cup sitting on my computer's keyboard. One of the studio's electricians found it in the main parking lot around dusk and caught it. From the coloring it appeared to be a Pepsis formosa but that's just a semi educated guess.
It appeared to be in good health but I could not see a stinger. I have seen tarantula hawk wasps at my sister's house in Sedona AZ and even had a dead specimen in my collection for some time. All had very visible, very scary looking stingers sticking out of the end of their abdomens.
This wasp had nothing. I didn't want to harm it but I did shake the cup it was enclosed in a bit to see if I could rile it enough to perhaps reveal a stinger. My thinking was that it might be drawn up inside the body in some manner.
Although it opened and closed its mandibles several times at me it never revealed a stinger, not once. I eventually released it in the park behind my building at the studio.
Hence my question, do male Pepsis wasps perhaps have no stingers? I can see where they wouldn't need them, they don't sting spiders and lay eggs like the females do and you can make an argument that their color and appearance alone would scare off most predators, so they don't really need them.
I could find no answer in the on-line literature. Nothing about the males being any different than the females could be found either way. Does anybody here know the answer?
Thanks in advance.
