Pat and I are in Berrien County, Georgia near the swimming hole in the bend of the Alapaha river outside of Nashville at a reunion held annually on the Rowan farm, the place where my father was born. The actual house my father was born in in 1923, the oldest of what would be 9 brothers and sisters, still stands across the road. Uncle Sonny is boiling peanuts and everyone is sitting around in the yard under the pecan trees. Luckily, even though it is still Summer, there are no gnats.
I look down and notice an assassin wasp struggling to drag a caterpillar that it had already paralyzed through the grass.
I point it out to Pat and in the process I frighten it enough to make it abandon its catch and fly off. A minute or so later the wasp flew back looking for the caterpillar. Working an area of about 2 by 2 feet the wasp kept at it for several minutes searching for the lost caterpillar. It did eventually find the caterpillar and returned to its task of dragging it... but where was it headed? Pat and I started watching.
This wasp dragged the caterpillar between its legs... a caterpillar that was about 1 & 1/2 times it's own length and easily 3 times it's weight. After about 4 - 5 feet of dragging I noticed that the wasp was dragging the wasp in a perfectly straight line. So... it seemed that the wasp knew where it was going. I continued to watch.
This wasp knew EXACTLY where it was going. It drug that caterpillar in a perfectly straight line for about 15 feet until the grass gave out arriving at edge of the sandy dirt road. There it took an immediate left turning and continuing down the edge of the road. About 4 - 5 feet of this and the wasp dropped the caterpillar and began searching for something in an area of about 1 -2 square feet.
Turns out that the wasp had already dug a hole BEFORE it went hunting. Not only did it know where it was when it stung the caterpillar it also knew how to get back to it's pre-dug hole... even after it was interrupted by me.
Amazing.
For those of you who don't know, assassin wasps sting caterpillars. This paralyzes the caterpillar but does not kill it. The wasp puts the caterpillar in a hole, lays eggs on it and then fills in the hole. This way the young wasps have fresh food when they hatch. Although this is a pretty grim form of child care, you can't deny that it is truly amazing that something that small, with such a tiny bit of nerve tissue for a brain, can fly out on a hunting trip and crawl back through the grass straight back to it's hole.
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