Fig Wasp

• GeneralWithout it the wild fig cannot set fruit: it is an obligate symbiosis.
• As she enters through the ostiole, an extremely narrow passage, the female loses her wings and often her antennae: it is a one-way journey from which she will never emerge.
• The males are born blind and wingless, fertilise the females inside the fig and chew the tunnel through which the females will leave; then they die inside the fig.
• Caprification, which means hanging wild figs full of wasps among cultivated fig trees, is a farming technique practised in the Mediterranean since antiquity.
• It is the fig's only pollinator: without it there are no Smyrna figs, and the practice of hanging wild caprifigs among the cultivated trees, caprification, has been known since antiquity.
• The adult female lives at most 48 hours outside the fig, and emerges with her eggs already mature.
• The males never leave: they are born, fertilise the females inside the syconium and die there.
• In the fig, which is dioecious, the wasp can only breed in the flowers of male trees: pollinating a female tree costs its offspring their lives, and yet the offset flowering prevents selection from leading it to avoid them.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Fig and caprifig trees in Mediterranean climates

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Blastophaga psenes · ScienceDirect (Hughes 1989) · Science Advances, How colonial animals evolve · Wikipedia, Zooid · Fichas de especie de Blastophaga psenes · datos de tamano de la familia Agaonidae

The pins mark the parks where its presence is documented.