'American Blue-black Spider Wasp' - Anoplius americanus

The subject of this post is one amazing species of spider wasp. It is one of the punier ones, however it is nonetheless striking. It's called Anoplius americanus, and it is characterized by the four orange semi-circular spots on its abdomen:
This pic shows 2, there are 2 more on the other side. 

The specimen I collected (shown above) was caught at the same goldenrod as I found the C. bipunctata on. This specimen is a female, I can tell by the stinger.  

Now, these things have to have prey to paralyze, being parasitic. You can probably tell by the name that the prey must be a spider; however, it gets really specific, with certain spider wasps paralyzing only 1 species, genus, or family. A. americanus takes as prey members of the wolf spider family, Lycosidae. These wasps can be parasitized by Ceropales bipunctata. How that works I won't go into here, but you should look at my post on that species (where I go into it in detail). At the field I keep mentioning in posts (and where I found this), there is a HUGE problem with HUGE wolf spiders. So there you have it, nature's spider control. 

I'll be posting more on nature's pest control (and the pests they control) later. I just started this blog, so I've been writing lots of posts today.  

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