Milde's tarantula-hawk wasp
Milde's tarantula-hawk wasp is a big metallic blue-black wasp with fiery red-orange wings. The mother hunts tarantulas, the big hairy spiders, to feed her babies. The grown-up wasps themselves just visit flowers.
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Fun facts
Tarantula hawks have almost no enemies that hunt them.
You can tell males and females apart by their feelers: males have straight ones, females have curly ones.
Males live one to two months, and females live longer.
It visits Quitobaquito Springs in Arizona along with three other kinds of tarantula hawks.
Most asked questions about Milde's tarantula-hawk wasp
?Why is it called a tarantula hawk?
Because the mother hunts tarantulas, like a hawk hunts mice, to feed her babies.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Pepsis mildei
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Pompilidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Pompilidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Pepsis mildei (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by (c) icosahedron, some rights reserved (CC BY). CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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