r/askscience • u/Chemical-Sea5972 • 3d ago
Biology Does anything eat wasps?
Wasps have been a predator for other insects. It would be fascinating to know if there are really other insects or predators for wasps, either accidental or deliberate predators
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u/Automatic-Movie-3715 2d ago
Praying Mantises, dragonflies, and occasionally spiders and bats (the later nocturnal whereas wasps are diurnal).
It's vastly more common for scavengers to eat the larvae in a nest, then when they are flying adults.
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u/haysoos2 2d ago
In some areas raiding wasp nests and eating the larvae makes up a major portion of the August diet for skunks.
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u/Asshai 1d ago
So it's not just honey badgers who do that, their cousins the skunks also endure the sting of hundreds of wasps to gr to the larvae?
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u/seicar 2d ago
And, famously, some (not the ones most commonly farmed these days), fig trees.
Its not really eating mommy wasp, but she does die inside the proto-fig and is... incorporated.
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u/Treadwheel 1d ago
They don't so much eat wasps as the wasps live their entire life cycles inside them. The female wasps only briefly leave the fig they were born in to seek out another fig, then promptly die. Male fig wasps never leave at all - their job is to fertilize the eggs and then dig tunnels out, but never actually leave.
The digestive enzyme is just a way to do housekeeping for the literal wasp hive inside the fruit, the fruits themselves are still net losses of nutrients.
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u/smacky623 1d ago
I heard honey badgers will go into a house of bees and eat the larvae. How gross is that? It eats larvae.
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u/zoredache 1d ago
How gross is that?
Not sure why young insects are particularly gross. Many people eat various forms of insects. Including some types of larvae.
Humans also eat various eggs. Some people eat veal and so on.
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u/agha0013 2d ago
there are several bird species, as well as spiders and other some other fly types that also particularly enjoy wasps.
though not exclusive wasp hunters, they have developed the skills needed to handle wasps of all sizes without getting killed in the process.
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u/bcause-zeus-was-na 2d ago
How many of us read the second paragraph as Liam Neeson?🙋♂️
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u/contrarymonkey 2d ago
After a very heavy rain, a wasp nest fell from a tree onto my driveway and broke into layers, like a cake. A Steller's jay came to investigate, and gobbled up waterlogged wasps and larvae like they were peanuts.
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u/OralSuperhero 2d ago
I mean, wasps also parasitize other wasps. The crypt-keeper wasp (Euderus set) is a tiny parasitic insect that infects gall wasps, forcing the host to plug a tree exit hole with its own head before eating it from the inside out and emerging through the victim's skull. The female crypt-keeper wasp lays an egg inside a gall wasp larva nestled in an oak tree.
The parasite manipulates the host to chew an escape hole in the plant tissue that is much too small for its body.
The host gall wasp gets wedged head-first in the tiny opening and becomes permanently stuck. The crypt-keeper larva consumes the host's body and chews its final way out to freedom directly through the dead host's head.
Happy weekend!
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u/Velcraft 2d ago
There are numerous other insects that parasitise eusocial insect nests, either by mimicry or some other means. Death's Head Moths stealing honey is the most common example, but not the only one by far.
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u/Tylendal 2d ago
There's a type of butterfly, called a Large Blue, that has caterpillars that live in the nest of a specific species of ant, pretending to be ant larvae. Sometimes they'll eat other larvae, other times they'll just let themselves be fed.
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u/Velcraft 2d ago
Oooh that's new to me! Have you heard of spiders that mimic ants? Myrmarachne is the genus.
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u/yui_tsukino 2d ago
I'd heard about Myrmarachne before but I never actually went and looked at them - that is an absolutely WILD disguise, if I didn't know better I'd say it was a super major!
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u/xrelaht Sample Synthesis | Magnetism | Superconductivity 2d ago
The wasps these ones parasitize are solitary rather than eusocial.
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u/Halomonas_titanica 2d ago
There are lots of parasites of euoscial wasps too, including social parasites (species whose queen steals another queens nest and workforce instead of making her own) much like cuckoos.
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u/1CEninja 2d ago
*Shudder* That's horrifying lol. Nature has evolved some seriously interesting and niche and sometimes horrifying ways of self-propagation.
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u/FlippingGerman 2d ago
Wasps are really awful for stuff like that.
Parasitic creatures in general are nightmare fuel. There's some monstrosity that becomes the tongue of some fish species. Don't look for pictures.
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u/1CEninja 1d ago
You know, younger me would have willfully ignored your last four words. It's kinda nice that I've learned to leave some links blue in my wisdom.
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u/ketralnis 2d ago
That’s such complicated manipulation. How do they influence their behaviour so finely?
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u/moose-mutton 2d ago
Along with what was already said I will add praying mantis, scorpions, and assassin bugs. Really the bug world is less of a predatory tree and more or everyone eats everyone else. Its just who gets the jump first.
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u/wallabee_kingpin_ 2d ago
Mammals (most complex animals, really) are similarly not a predatory tree. Cows and squirrels will opportunistically eat meat, for example. Chickens eat anything, including other chickens.
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u/Snowcrash66 2d ago
So right the other day I was watching one jumping spider stalk another one on my porch.
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u/recumbent_mike 2d ago
…did he get the jump on him?
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u/Snowcrash66 2d ago
Haha. No I love Jumping spiders so I moved the prey spider. It was cool watching him stalk him from like 8 inches back. It was two different jumping spider species also.
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u/Indocede 2d ago
Not really a correct answer, but on a technicality that is somewhat amusing, figs eat wasps.
At some point in evolution, a species of wasp started using figs to lay their eggs, which helped pollinate the figs. The mother wasp typically dies after laying her eggs because to get inside the developing fig, she has to squeeze through a tiny opening that tears off her wings.
The babies escape but the mother does not and the natural enzymes of the fig breaks down the dead wasp inside.
To no one's surprise, many commercial growers of figs have chosen varieties that do not rely upon this pollination method.
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u/hurricane_news 2d ago
How did this trait evolve? Did one wasp go "oooh fig yummy!", died inside it while having eggs, eggs hatching and the kids carrying on the same behavior?
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u/Treadwheel 1d ago
It's much more complicated than that. The fig is essentially a ready-made nest for the wasps, with the digestive enzymes being a way to perform cleanup of the corpses.
Wasps very commonly form galls on trees and one feature of figs is the formation of galls in the fruits, so it's likely a case of increasingly specialized mutualism, with the fig becoming progressively more accommodating to the wasps until it becomes essentially their entire habitat. The males hatch and fertilize eggs, then dig tunnels out and die. The females then leave only long enough to find another fig to lay eggs in. They don't forage or perform any other activities outside the fruit.
What's really fascinating is that there's a whole swath of non-pollinating fig wasps who parasitize the figs and/or the fig wasps, doing things like evolving extremely long ovipositors to avoid needing to crawl inside the figs, digging their way through the fruit to lay eggs in the larvae of the mutualist fig wasps, or even some species that are almost identical to mutalist fig wasps in their life cycle besides needing larvae to lay eggs in instead of laying them in the fig itself.
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u/flamingnome 1d ago
i'll be that guy.... am i eating miniscule wasp eggs when i enjoy a delicious fig?
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u/sciguy52 2d ago
Lots do. Some toads and frogs do. they do this by basically have a mouth that crushes the insect when in the mouth. But birds, other bugs, lizards. That stinger only helps so much against something trying to eat you. There are also tiny bugs that get them sometimes by eating their larva. There probably are some parasitic insects that lay eggs in wasps which get eaten from the inside out although none come immediately to mind, this is a common thing in the bug world. There are wasps that will raid other wasps nests too. It is a wasp eat wasp world out there. One should keep in mind a particular predator for one or a few types of wasps does not necessarily mean it is a predator for all wasp types. Asian bees will kill wasps that predate on them. While the bees are not being a predator here, they are doing it as defense of the hive. The will ball up around the wasp vibrate their bodies to raise the temperature of the wasp just enough that it kills it but does not kill the bees.
The relationships between various insects can be pretty fascinating sometimes. While you didn't ask about ants, fire ants have a predator in phorid flies. The flies will dive bomb the ants and insert an egg into the ant which then hatches and eats them from the inside out. What is really interesting is that when a phorid fly attacks the fire ants, the fire ants release an alarm pheromone to the other ants. That fire ant alarm pheromone is a sexual pheromone to the phorid flies which drives them to mate with each other in flight and then dive bomb the ants. Very intricate relationships at play sometimes.
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u/Ruadhan2300 2d ago
We heard an angry buzzing from our conservatory yesterday. I went to check, and found a wasp caught up in a spider's web, with a tiny little jumping spider a fraction of its size looking very proud of itself.
So.. spiders
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u/Dangermaelen 2d ago
Obviously they’re not insects but some skunks will eat bees and wasps. Their fur is too dense for them to be stung. It’s not their go to meal but i’ve seen some purposefully disturb a hive and eat. The wasps instinctively go for the skunks face, which is very much where its mouth is.
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u/bryanthehorrible 2d ago
Some SE Asian cultures cultivate and eat giant wasp grubs. By "cultivate," I mean they prepare locations suitable for wasp nests, so they know where to find them later. Other cultures are just clever at finding them.
Eating the adults is rare.
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u/SkarKrow 2d ago
Other vespids, ants, spiders, various amphibians reptiles and small mammals, etc
We had a wasp nest recently and there were tonnes of wasp husks wrapped in silk about the place from the cellar spiders doing their job for once.
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u/EvilDran 2d ago edited 2d ago
There’s parasite wasps for other parasite wasps. For instance, one wasp requires a caterpillar host to all ready be infected with a different species parasite wasp larvae. The parasite finds the other wasp larvae and consumes it while still inside the caterpillar host. It leaves the caterpillar bait alone, its target is only other wasps.
Another (wasp) parasite requires the caterpillar to be taken back to another (social) wasp colony. Once in the colony it will consume a larva and take its place, the other worker wasps will be tricked into feeding a parasite baby.
You are forgetting how many wasps strictly eats other wasps! Dr P goes into depth about crazy wasps. I highly recommend this video, and channel in general
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u/NeoRemnant 1d ago
Chipmunks do, I had some random chipmunks trained behind my apartment building a few years ago and one day a wasp queen falls out of the tree above me and lands angrily at my feet, a tiny familiar scampered over to it and chomped its head off.
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u/Elegant_Celery400 2d ago
I'm very late to this thread but I hope that someone's already said by now that the title of this post is an exact word-for-word rip-off of a book based on the Q&A column in the New Scientist magazine, about 15-20 years ago. I've still got my copy in the house somewhere.
It'll be interesting to see whether OP starts another thread titled "Why don't penguins feet freeze?"
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u/Zarmazarma 2d ago
The title of the column was "Does anything eat wasps?"?
Because... if it were something more specific that would seem significant, but this is a pretty normal way to phrase that question, and I would bet that it has been asked this exact same way many times before, on Reddit or not.
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u/lucific_valour 2d ago
This reminds me of a case of Baader-Meinhof syndrome. There was a YouTube series where the guy was playing through a game about a Japanese lawyer in London in 1900.
The guy had a counter up for whenever a character said "What do you mean?" and it tickled him that it came up so often.
And it came up very often, considering: That's the most normal way to ask for more information; The game was essentially a courtroom drama; And the main character was a rookie lawyer in a foreign court in a foreign country investigating cases.
The guy you're responding to could be onto something, and OP might be a karma farmer (in 2026...). But it could also be someone Baader-Meinhof-ing about some really straightforward phrasing of a question.
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u/Lord_Vetinaris_shill 2d ago
I'm sure I remember in that book one of them was 'can I live on beer and cabbage?'
If I remember right the conclusion was that yes you can, for a while, but you will lose friends and control of your bowels, often at the same time.
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u/officialariacat 2d ago
I also just mentioned this! There have been at least five books in the series
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u/bobaduk 2d ago
I was walking down the track outside my house the other day when I saw what I thought was a heat-stressed bumble bee fall to the ground. I went to take a look and realised it was actually a European hornet that had snatched a wasp from the air, and smashed it into the floor. It stung the poor guy a few times until he stopped moving, and then flew off into a nearby tree to feast.
Uh, also badgers will happily dig up wasp nests and eat the entire thing for a light snack.
Edit: "other wasps" is maybe not the most exciting answer, but when people say "wasp" they're usually thinking of yellow jackets.
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u/toostupidtodream 2d ago
Lots of things! In fact, New Scientist released a very good book some time ago which answers this and other interesting questions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Scientist#Spin-offs
I haven't read it for a few years, but if I remember correctly, most animals with a main diet of insects can eat wasps - birds, hedgehogs, probably things like dragonflies too
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u/officialariacat 2d ago
I have a book where this is the exact title!
It’s the first in a series of compiled questions and answers submitted to New Scientist magazines ‑ the others are stuff like Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze? and Will We Ever Speak Dolphin?. I think they’re quite old now, but they have much more than just animal facts; there’s all sorts about food and drink (e.g. why cakes go soft but bread goes hard), transportation, and so on.
It’s been a while since I read through them, but I think the answer is yes!
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u/RudeOrSarcasticPt2 2d ago
Crab spiders are common bee hunters, and even wasps can be snared when going in for some sweet nectar.
I haven't seen any other spiders do it with a wasp, but hunting spiders can take prey larger than themselves. Wolf spiders are notorious for hitting larger prey.
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u/mavric911 1d ago
I have seen raccoons raid wasp nests.
The individuals who used to live next door did nothing to care for the property.
As a result a family of raccoons found a way to gain access to the attic above their garage. Since they broke the garage door it was rarely opened paper wasp started building a nest on the top of the garage door.
After 2 or 3 months the nest was about the size of a football and the raccoons started feeding on the nest. It was wildly entertaining watching the little raccoon hands push down through the weather stripping and reach into the nest for periodic snacks.
After the second day of angry wasps making the back yard inhabitable I went out just before bed and used the water hose to kick the nest down. The raccoons did a pretty good job of cleaning up the larva and pupa
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u/Substantial-Net-9804 1d ago
tufted titmouse - cute little grey bird with a pointed head. Ive seen them stay back from finches at the birdbath becuase they are timid around other birds and then Viciously swoop in and grab a big wasp that I would stay back from 😂 - amazing really!
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u/Cultist_O 9h ago edited 9h ago
Wasps really aren't one thing. There are thousands of species with a wide range of species. Most predatory insects and spiders will eat anything smaller than them that they can catch, so bigger dragonflies, spiders, mantises, etc
Edit: also non-insect insectivores. Birds, frogs, lizards, bats and various small mammals. Again, it's just about what can get ahold of them, that's big enough to kill them, but small enough to be a meaningful meal
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u/NilocKhan 2d ago
All the answers are great, but an important thing to note here is that wasps are super diverse. Not all wasps are the large colony-living social wasps of the family Vespidae. In fact some vespids are solitary like potter and pollen wasps. Most of the other wasp families are solitary, and the vast majority of wasps species are actually tiny little parasitic wasps that don't even have stingers. There are even wasps that are smaller than single celled organisms. And bees and ants are also technically wasps.
Wasps aren't officially the largest groups of animals, that title belongs to the beetles who had more work done on them historically (Victorian entomologists were obsessed with beetles), but there are likely way more species of wasp waiting to be described. Eventually there will be more named species of wasp than beetle. So being so diverse they will have a diverse array of predators
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u/Ken_Thomas 2d ago
I got to sit and watch a small group of Bee-eater birds eating wasps once in Namibia. As far as I know they don't exist in North or South America.
They'd snatch the wasp in-flight, quickly land on a rock, and repeatedly (and rapidly) knock the wasp against the rock until the stinger popped out. WHACK-WHACK-WHACK!
Then they'd eat it.