In the late 1970s, entomologist Coby Schalwas in the rainforests of Costa Rica, watching a wasp. Every few
minutes, the wasp would soar up into the canopy and snatch a helpless
insect, then buzz back down and bury its prey in a nest below ground.
After watching this sequence unfold numerous times, Schal decided to dig
up the lair to see what the wasp was up to.
What he discovered was a
miniature house of horrors. “Every single cell within the nest was filled with cockroaches,”
said Schal, a professor of entomology at North Carolina State
University. Each roach had been stung, paralyzed, and jailed in subterranean
burrows filled with other roaches, like a particularly disgusting box of
See’s chocolates.
Those chambers also contained a single wasp egg,
which would eventually hatch and devour the cockroaches in its larder
before emerging from the ground to seek its own prey. Being accustomed to the monstrosities of nature, Schal wasn’t too
phased by the whole zombifying, eating-alive routine.
What interested
him far more about the subterranean death dungeon was the fact that he’d
never seen any of these roach species before. So he bagged the bugs up—over 20 different kinds in all—and sent them off to two of the late, great cockroach experts, Louis Roth and Frank Fisk. If anyone in the world knew what these roaches were, it’d be these guys. But Roth and Fisk were just as clueless as Schal. Whatever these
species were, they did not belong to the approximately 5,000 or so
species of cockroaches known to science. And, though the story of the wasp finally found its way into publication in 2010, those species remain undescribed to this day, says Schal. We’re talking about more than 20 kinds of cockroaches discovered
one day in a wasp’s lair in Costa Rica. Animals never before seen by
scientists and, perhaps, never seen since. Such is the almost
inconceivable state of cockroach biodiversity. So here's my plea: Scientists of Tomorrow, please go study cockroaches, because I’m not nearly done writing about them. I promise they won't give you gastroenteritis.
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