Long-tailed giant ichneumon wasp
The long-tailed giant ichneumon wasp has a reddish-brown body with black and yellow-orange stripes. The female has an amazingly long, thread-like tail. With it, she can drill right into wood to lay an egg.
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Fun facts
With her tail, the female can be more than 13 centimetres long.
The long tail is made of three threads. The middle one does the drilling, and the two outer ones protect it.
The female can find a wood-boring larva through the bark of a tree.
She lays her egg on the larva, and the baby wasp eats it within a couple of weeks.
Males are smaller and have no long tail at all.
Most asked questions about Long-tailed giant ichneumon wasp
?How big is the long-tailed giant ichneumon wasp?
Its body is up to about 5 centimetres long, and with the female's tail it can be over 13 centimetres.
?What does the long tail do?
It drills into dead wood so the wasp can lay an egg on a larva hiding inside.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Megarhyssa macrurus
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1771
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Ichneumonidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Ichneumonidae
- Lives on
- North America
- Also known as
- Long-tailed giant ichneumonid wasp
Where the facts come from
- Megarhyssa macrurus (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Seney Natural History Association. CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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