An interesting diet
An emerald cockroach wasp has a diet few humans would tolerate. As the name suggests, these parasitic insects feed on cockroaches. Not only do they eat them, they actually lay their egg in its dead body.
While the baby wasps are incubating, they actually release a kind of cleaning fluid that cleans the “cockroach meat,” which the wasp will feed on once it’s ready to eat.
“They virtually soak their cockroach host with the secretion to inhibit the growth of competitive microbes that would degrade their food and of pathogenic microbes that threaten their lives,” said study co-author Gudrun Herzner, a researcher at Germany’s University of Regensburg.
Herzner says this discovery is somewhat shocking.
“The finding is surprising, because such a simple, little insect larva uses such a sophisticated strategy to ward off detrimental bacteria,” Herzner said. “The larvae are like little chemical plants that produce large amounts of different antimicrobial substances.”
Other clean insects
Believe it or not, other insects make their own homemade cleaning supplies too.
According to LiveScience, the European beewolf wasp hunts honeybees, and coats their bodies in an oily substance that inhibits microbes from growing. Certain types of burying beetles also disinfect the carrion they use as larval food.
The study was published in the January edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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