One of the truly amazing things about the Internet, is how it can link up people with some incredibly disparate bits information, or find audiences for bits of information that were never intended for it. For all of its apparent desires to rule the universe, Google sure is an incredible tool.
Back in September I wrote about my friend Niore’s discovery of a wasp in the hills above Arctic Bay. Now at the time he found it it generated a little bit of media buzz (oh yeah, I intended that) in Nunavut, and even managed to get some southern media exposure. Not knowing what the insect was at the time Niore sent pictures 
of the wasp down to Iqaluit, to the Nunavut Research Institute, and they advised him it was a Yellow Jacket (Vespula intermedia), and when I asked him for the photo’s etc. for The House I accepted that without much thought, and posted about it, and it ended up on Circus of the Spineless.
Enter the World Wide Web. A couple of weeks ago I received an email from an adjunct lecturer from the University of Massachusetts who had stumbled across the post, while doing a search for V. intermedia. He didn’t know what kind of wasp it was that Niore had found, but he did know it wasn’t a Yellow Jacket. Moreover, he offered (and I quickly accepted) to ask the other people on his entomology mailing list to help identify it. (As an added bonus it generated quite a few hits to the blog)
The next day I received another email from a member of that list, and a talented "bug" artist Eric Eaton, with at least a partial id on the wasp. It was an ichneumon wasp, one of the parasitic wasps that lay eggs on caterpillars. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to go much farther with the id, without the wasp in hand. I was hoping to narrow it down a bit, however I quickly found that the inchneumons are one of the largest insect families there are, with some 60,000 species. So I was not able to find out where it would normally be found, and just how strange it would be to be found up here (fairly strange I would imagine)
So there you have it, not a Yellow Jacket but still in need of a parka, and it probably searched and searched in vain for its host caterpillar. Now I guess all I can do is sit back and wait for someone else to stumble across this post, and enlighten me further.
UPDATE November 27th. Okay, more people are weighing in on the identification and it is getting more confusing, now it may be from the family Vespidae, or possibly from sphecidae, but not ichneumonidae. I’m sooo confused. Someone must know for sure(?)
Comments
8 responses
No enlightenment to offer, but just appreciation of the marvels of the internet and how well connected we all are. Even in the remote corners of the world.
Thanks to a cold wasp above Arctic Bay.
Wonderful story.
Its definately not an ichneumon… sphecid wasps are a possibility, but given the shape of the body and the wings, I would guess some form of Vespid wasp. Unfortunately, my guide for identification of Vespid wasps is sitting in a box in a storage room in Naniamo, and other copies are hard to find. (The definitive guide to this group of wasps was put together by a lecturer at a small Christian college in England, and is probably the only biological publication this college has ever put out).
Crap, double posted.
Anyway, I found an online version of a commonly used key for North American vespid wasps at:
http://www.entomology.ucr.edu/ebeling/ebel9-2.html#key
The catch is that this key may not be reliable for high arctic Vespids, due to variation in body coloration and patterning (its based on average markings from west-coast species). It also includes some characters not visible in the picture.
However, after looking a bit closer at the picture, I’m thinking that its not a Vespid after all… the wings don’t have the characteristic folding in half (though its a bit hard to tell), and the antenna does not have a long segment at the base, rather all the segments are the same length. This suggests Sphecid wasps.
Thanks Bughunter, I just received an email a little earlier from a forensic entomologist who basically said the same as your first post (I deleted the duplicate entry)
I’m going to go have a look at the key now, at least as best I can from the picture. The initial post generated the email thinking it was a sphecid wasp.
Thanks RD also
The antenna have me thinking its a sphecid wasp… unfortunately, that gives you about 80-100 species to choose from, most of which are described in hard-to-find literature. I found an online document that lists (without a key, unfortunately) the Yukon Sphecid wasps:
http://www.biology.ualberta.ca/bsc/pdf/finnamore.pdf
In theory, the NE arctic should have less species, since it was the last deglaciated (and the Yukon is a mixing area for NA and NE Asian species), but there are probably species in the eastern Arctic not mentioned in this document.
You might want to track down Goulet’s “Hymenoptera of the World”… besides being one of the best identification guides (albiet primarily to family, though genera for some groups) its also got great diagrams and is a Canadian government publication to boot. Less accessable but more relevant is Sphecid wasps of the World… a bit hard to find (pub 1976, and not many copies), and way to broad for the general reader, though it has decent diagrams. The advantage you have is that with so few genera in the arctic, you could skip 90% of the identification key and zero in on the five or so likely taxa, making identification easy.
Annoyingly, I have both these books, again gathering dust a continent away. Otherwise I could do the ID for you.
If you haven’t guessed, I used to ID insects for a living. Ah, for the good old days….
Bughunter, have you seen the other picture of the wasp, posted on my original post (linked as “September” in the above post), in general it is a better picture.
I also have them at a higher resolution, but not posted.
Okay… I couldn’t see that first segment in the above picture, but now that I do, it rules out the Vespinae (hornets, yellow jackets). There is an outside chance its a paper wasp (also Vespids, but with a narrow first abdominal segment), but the antenna don’t look right – there should be a long segment followed by many short segments, and I’m not seeing that on the pictures.
The Sphecid wasps seem like the likeliest suspects… a number of them mimic hornets (see for example some of the pictures at this site:
http://cedarcreek.umn.edu/insects/orderpages/025pg-sphecidae.html
), and it would fit with the antenna. Hard to ID without an actual specimen, though.