Wasps can recognize faces as well as apes can (out in Science today). The team taught paper wasps (Polistes fuscatus), whose faces sport distinctive brown and creamy markings, to associate certain wasp mugshots with safety and others with danger in an electrified maze. The wasps flew to safety quicker and with fewer errors when a kind face led the way, the team found. They lost that ability to distinguish when they plucked off the antennae. Weird!
This 70 mya dinosaur egg is from a titanosaur, considered one of the most massive of all dinosaur species ever. It contains the fossilized cocoons of wasps! Modern day wasps are well known for laying their eggs inside dead animals, but this is the first piece of evidence of similar behavior in ancient wasps.
Read more about it in the July issue of Paleontology: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4983.2011.01064.x/abstract
As anyone who has been stung by one would know, wasps have anger management issues. The yellow jacket wasp is no different, but when it wants to bully something small, it eschews the stinger for something more creative. When a wasp comes upon a swarm of ants on food it wants, it will simply pick the pests up and fling them away: a previously undocumented way of dealing with a competitor that is reported for the first time in Biology Letters today.
Click here to see the cage fight designed by scientists:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/03/watch-out-below-wasps-battle-ant.html?ref=hp
