3 Wasps That Will Do Anything to Survive
From ripping your own appendages off to cockroach mind control, wasps go to great lengths to ensure the survival of their species. Hosted by: Hank Green ---------- Support SciShow by becoming...
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Wasps have a pretty bad rep: nobody wants yellowjackets pestering them at picnics. It’s not like they make honey...they just sting you! But there’s around 30,000 species of them, more than all known mammals and birds combined! Some are stunning to look at, while others have ridiculous names like “gasteruption jaculator” or “aha ha.” And some wasps go to pretty extreme lengths to survive and reproduce: getting trapped in figs, destroying their own nervous system, and cockroach mind-control! You probably know bees are great pollinators. And some wasps are too, like the fig wasp! They’ve lived, mated, and died inside figs for millions of years, driving a complicated evolutionary relationship. A young fig is actually a bunch of tiny flowers f...
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Wasps have a pretty bad rep: nobody wants yellowjackets pestering them at picnics. It’s not like they make honey...they just sting you! But there’s around 30,000 species of them, more than all known mammals and birds combined! Some are stunning to look at, while others have ridiculous names like “gasteruption jaculator” or “aha ha.” And some wasps go to pretty extreme lengths to survive and reproduce: getting trapped in figs, destroying their own nervous system, and cockroach mind-control! You probably know bees are great pollinators. And some wasps are too, like the fig wasp! They’ve lived, mated, and died inside figs for millions of years, driving a complicated evolutionary relationship. A young fig is actually a bunch of tiny flowers f...
