Natures wonders: wood-penetrating wasp ovipositor (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, October 19, 2023, 15:38 (191 days ago) @ David Turell

Better than our needles:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGwHLgVxKlcWRjcDxXdfkWlHDnB

"Megarhyssa pracellens isn’t the kind of insect you’d want to run into in a dark alley. These enormous parasitic wasps are roughly the size of a human finger, and their reproduction strategy resembles something out of the Alien franchise. The female Megarhyssa possesses a long ovipositor, which she uses to drill into the woody homes of larval wood wasps and deposit her eggs inside their bodies. When her larvae hatch, they eat the wood wasps from the inside out.

"Macabre as that is, what intrigued researchers is the ovipositor itself: It’s incredibly thin, only slightly wider than a human hair, which makes its ability to penetrate wood remarkable. Long, slender objects are usually only able to withstand a certain amount of force—known in mathematics as Euler’s critical load—before bending or buckling. As a result, these types of elements are rarely used in engineering.

"Now, scientists have discovered how the female Megarhyssa wasp is able to tolerate forces many times greater than Euler’s critical load. It turns out that flexible structures within the insect’s abdomen stabilize different parts of the ovipositor as they alternately retract and protract, increasing the amount of pressure the overall structure can withstand.

"The researchers replicated this mechanism by crafting a multipart flexible microneedle, which successfully penetrated solid silicone without buckling. This discovery, they say, could one day aid in the design of technologies for medical applications, like more robust needles."

Comment: more evidence nature is smarter than human inventers. What interest me here is how this evolved and why this wasp decided to cannibalize another form of wasp. Not explained by Darwinism. Why try to reach wasps protected in wood? Direct design is a much better explanation.