Sabre Wasp

• It locates its victim through several centimetres of solid wood, detecting with its antennae the vibrations it 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 & 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