Not long after we moved into our house in the desert (this is two or three years ago now), we were sitting in our breakfast room looking out over our backyard when Cheryl saw a commotion about sixty feet away and said, "There's a tarantula and a wasp fighting."
We had been eating our lunch, but without saying another word we dropped our silverware, grabbed our cameras, and tore out of the house. This was entirely reasonable behavior for people like us who were heavily into nature photography. What Cheryl with her brief sentence had described was a Tarantula Hawk, a large and ferocious wasp with the most painful sting of any wasp in the country, which was in the act of attacking a tarantula. This creature hunts down tarantulas, stabs them into paralysis, then lays an egg on them so that the larval wasp can feast on its still living flesh. Photographing the battles between these formidable creatures is one of a nature photographer's holy grails and there it was right outside the door.
Well, yesterday history seemed to be repeating itself. I was looking out the same window at almost exactly the same place, and I could pick out the bright red wings of a Tarantula Hawk, and when I put my binoculars on it I could see that it was rolling over the limp body of a tarantula. It had already paralyzed its prey and was carrying it back to its pre-dug hole (you can see the hole behind it that it is backing into) to bury it.
The first thing it did was crawl down inside its hole, and try to pull the spider under, but the spider wouldn't fit.
So it came back up and got another grip.
Now it's got a better grip and it is trying again to pull it down into the hole (on top of its head.).
And now it is gone.
The larval wasp will continue developing inside the tarantula's body while the wasp mother flies off to find another tarantula, to repeat the whole process.
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