This is one of my most frequent questions. People love bees, but they think wasps are just mean and that they sting for no reason. I’ve been around so many wasps and picked up wasps and never been stung – if you respect them like any other animal they’ll leave you alone unless under very unusual circumstances.
They are also basically “keystone predators,” they feed on so many other insects that if wasps disappeared the balance would go so haywire that many insects would wipe out other species, then each other, then we would lose more species that depended on those insects.
Wasps are so important to insect population control that plant life communicates with them about it directly. When a tree is being eaten by caterpillars, it will release stress pheromones that evolved just to attract the one species of wasp that specializes in those caterpillars as prey! This is so precise, corn crops can tell if they’re being eaten by either bollworms or armyworms – very similar caterpillars, but parasitized by two different wasps.
They are also major pollinators – orchids and many other flowers are pollinated only by wasps, not bees, though wasps will also pollinate all the same flowers that bees do.
Most people convinced that wasps are just evil and useless seem to be recalling a yellow jacket sting more than anything else; yellow jackets make huge nests that can be underground, so you can be walking all over it and pissing them off without knowing, whereas other animals would hear the vibration and steer clear.
if you described cicadas to someone who’d never heard of them, it would be indistinguishable from a shitpost
a type of insect that spends many years underground (usually a prime number), before emerging en masse to spend a week clinging to trees and screaming before they all die
im not entirely convinced this isnt a shitpost
clinging to trees and screaming AND FUCKING before dying
Order Lepidoptera (Butterflies and Moths)
No Taxon (Moths)
Superfamily Bombycoidea
Family Sphingidae (Sphinx Moths)
Subfamily Macroglossinae
Tribe Macroglossini
GenusEumorpha
Speciespandorus(Pandorus Sphinx – Hodges#7859)
Hodges Number 7859
Other Common Names Pandora Sphinx
Synonyms and other taxonomic changes First described in 1806 by Jacob Hübner as Daphnis pandorus Eumorpha pandorus
Explanation of Names Greek pandoros (πανδωρος) can mean either “giving all” or “given all”. The name Pandora (πανδωρα) is the feminine form of this word.
Size Wingspan 87-115 mm Identification Adult:
forewing olive green with darker green apical patch and border along
inner margin, broken near anal angle; pink streaks near middle of wing
and at inner margin; double black discal spot; hindwing whitish basally,
green distally, with two large black patches, and some pink at anal
angle
[adapted from description by Charles Covell]
Larva: body bright green or reddish-brown
with swollen third thoracic segment into which head and first 2
thoracic segments can be drawn; abdomen with small white to yellow spot
on segment 2 and large oval spots around spiracle on third to seventh
segments; whiplike horn of early instars replaced with button in last
stage; thorax and anterior abdominal segments with dorsal black spotting
[adapted from description by David Wagner and Valerie Giles]
Range Eastern United States (Maine to Florida, west to Texas, north to Nebraska and Wisconsin) plus Ontario and Nova Scotia
Season adults fly from May to October
larvae present from June to November Food Larvae feed on leaves of peppervine (Ampelopsis spp.), grape (Vitis spp.), and Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia). Life Cycle one generation per year in the north; two generations in the south
Remarks An extra-spectacular sphinx moth.
PiraticOctopus 