“The first thing I’m going to do when I get back is get some decent food.”

Every time I come across new behavior among parasitoid and exoparasitic wasps, I figure that I’ve read it all. They can’t get any more surreal and horrifying than the one before, can they? And then a friend passed on the story of Polistes dominulus and Xenos vesparum: the former is a European paper wasp, and the latter is a parasitoid fly. Neonate flies that turn their hosts into anarchic wasp queens: that reminds me of a song about a distant relation of mine.