Sabre Wasp

• It locates its victim through several centimetres of solid wood, detecting with its antennae the vibrations the victim makes as it gnaws and the smell of the fungi that go with it.
• Its ovipositor, finer than a hair, drills through the wood for almost half an hour until it reaches the larva and lays an egg on it.
• It has been deliberately introduced into New Zealand and Australia to control woodwasp pests in pine plantations.
• Its ovipositor is longer than its own body: between 2 and 4 cm, as fine as a horsehair, with a tip reinforced with accumulated metals that let it drill through solid wood.
• And it does not drill blind. It locates the hidden larva by smell — but not the larva's own: it detects the symbiotic fungi of the genus Amylostereum that grow in the galleries of the woodwasps. In other words, it smells its host's fungus.
• At close range it fine-tunes with its antennae and with the ovipositor itself, then drills through centimetres of wood until it reaches the larva, paralyses it and lays an egg on it.
• The wasp's larva devours the host alive over the course of about five weeks.
• It is one of the largest ichneumonids in Europe, with females of up to 4 cm not counting the ovipositor.
• It has been introduced into several countries as a biological control agent against the invasive woodwasps that attack pine plantations.
• Its drilling mechanism has inspired the design of flexible surgical needles able to follow curved paths.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Pine and fir woods with standing dead wood

Sources consulted: Spradbery, Studies on the biology of Rhyssa persuasoria; Frasson et al. (2010), proyecto STING; NatureSpot

Best time: June to August, on the trunks of dead conifers