Samurai wasp
The samurai wasp is a teeny black wasp, only 1 or 2 millimetres long, with orange and black legs. It is a tiny helper for farmers. It lays its eggs inside the eggs of the brown marmorated stink bug, a bug that damages fruit and vegetables.
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Fun facts
Out of each stink bug egg comes exactly one new samurai wasp.
A wasp is bigger or smaller depending on how big the egg was that it grew up in.
In its home in Asia it can have up to 10 generations in one year, while the stink bug has only 2.
In 2014 it was found living wild in the United States. Nobody had let it out: it had found its own way there.
Most asked questions about Samurai wasp
?Why is the samurai wasp useful?
It stops brown marmorated stink bugs from hatching, and those bugs damage fruit and vegetables.
?How big is the samurai wasp?
Only 1 to 2 millimetres long, smaller than a grain of rice.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Trissolcus japonicus
- Named by
- Ashmead, 1904
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Scelionidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Scelionidae
- Lives on
- Asia, Europe, North America, South America
Where the facts come from
- Trissolcus japonicus (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 Elijah Talamas. Public domain, 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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