Treasure of the month: A rare and small giant among wasps
Huge here in the picture, but in actually rather inconspicuously small: our treasure of the month is about half the size of a pea. © LIB, Vogel
Since 2013, this animal slumbered undiscovered in the collections of Museum Koenig Bonn. It is a female specimen of the species Aspicera forshzarai. So far, there is no German name for this species, since it, as well as almost all closely related species, have been studied only sparsely. Only with the start of the third phase of the successful project “German Barcode of Life” (GBOL) in summer 2020, the diversity of this family of parasitoid wasps in Germany has come back into focus.
Our treasure of the month belongs to the family of the so-called figitids. However, while most animals within the family have an average body length of two millimeters, the aspicerines, i.e. Aspicera forshzarai and its close relatives, are true giants with a body size of around five millimeters. Compared to other, more conspicuous insects, this is of course still relatively small. It is surprising, however, why this species was only described scientifically in 2013.
Above all, this is probably due to the rarity of the animals. In the museums of Europe there are only a few numbers of specimens of the genus Aspicera – if any. If we then want to distinguish the species from each other, we do not have much to compare in order to form a final opinion on the species boundaries. Moreover, there are simply hardly any experts in the world who deal with the biological diversity of figitids. This quickly accumulates a pile of work, because only those groups are worked on from which sufficient material is available to better assess the intraspecific variability of the animals.
The animal is not only special because of its rarity and beauty, this specimen is also the first record for the state of Hesse. The description of the species is based on old museum material, which comes from North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg and Saxony among others. If we include the specimens from other countries, our Treasure of the Month is the latest record of this species in Europe since 1960!
Aspicerines are considered parasitoids of hoverfly larvae. This means that they usually lay their eggs in the larvae of the hoverflies, so that their own larvae hatch from them, which in turn consume the host larvae and towards the end of their development also kill them. For our wasp, on the other hand, an unusual host is named, the larvae of the red bush horned wasp (Neodiprion sertifer). However, since the host information for most parasitoids is generally unknown and a mention of the host on an accompanying label is difficult to verify on an animal, this information is very difficult to be confirmed.
