Seventy-four cuckoos in the nest: A new key to all North European cuckoo wasp species

Date:December 28, 2015

Source:Pensoft Publishers

Captivating with their bright, vivid and brilliantly metallic bodies, the cuckoo wasps are also fascinating with their curious lifestyle, which has given them this common name. However, in terms of their taxonomic grouping, they have been quite problematic due to similarities between species and a wide range of variations within them.

To shed light on the issue, an international research team, led by MSc Juho Paukkunen, Finnish Museum of Natural History, Helsinki, provides descriptions and illustrations of all 74 species found in the Nordic and Baltic countries, including one new, in their recent publication in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

Beautiful in appearance, the cuckoo wasps penetrate the nests of unrelated solitary wasps and solitary bees to lay their eggs, similar to how a cuckoo bird does in songbird nests. With their armoured bodies and the ability to curl up into a tight ball the cuckoo wasps are well-defended against the owners of the nests and their stings and jaws. At the larval stage, they take advantage of their hosts by either parasitising them or stealing their food, eventually killing the host's offspring.

Within the Nordic representatives of the family there are an exceptionally large number of red-listed and endangered species. This is one of the reasons why the authors intend to trigger more interest among their fellow entomologists about these curious wasps. They have compiled all relevant information concerning their distribution, abundance, habitats, flight season and host species. The authors have tried to keep their identification key as comprehensive and concise as possible, by singling out the essential information on diagnostic characters.

Continued ...