This new species of wasp is one of the most terrifying sounding creatures I have heard of to date. This wasp turns it’s prey into a zombie and proceeds to eat it alive. Disgusting and terrifying! This wasp is said to one of 139 new species discovered in the Greater Mekong region.
This wasp is named after the mythical creatures from ‘Harry Potter’ who suck out the souls of their prey. According to The World Wildlife Fund, the Dementor wasp or Ampulex dementor injects venom into cockroach prey, right in the belly, rendering it a “passive zombie.”
“Cockroach wasp venom blocks receptors of the neurotransmitter octopamine, which is involved in the initiation of spontaneous movement,” according to the report. “With this blocked, the cockroach is still capable of movement, but is unable to direct its own body. Once the cockroach has lost control, the wasp drags its stupefied prey by the antennae to a safe shelter to devour it.”
The red and black colored wasp is native to Thailand It has patterned wings and “belongs to an ant-mimicking group of species with attractive coloration and rather bizarre habitus and probably also behavior.”
A natural history museum in Berlin, the Museum für Naturkunde, asked visitors to pick the wasp’s name from among four options: “Bicolor,” after its red-black pattern; “Mon,” after a local ethnic group where the wasp lives; “Plagiator,” since it mimics, or “plagiarizes,” ants; and “Dementor,” described to visitors as “magical beings, which can consume a person’s soul, leaving their victims as an empty but functional body without personality and emotions.” Dementor won by popular vote of the 300 visitors polled.
The wasp was just one of hundreds of new species discovered. Carlos Drews, WWF’s director of the global species program said, “We’ve only skimmed the surface of new discoveries in the Greater Mekong,” he added, “However, while species are being discovered, intense pressures are taking a terrible toll on the region’s species. One wonders how many species have disappeared before they were even discovered.”
Source Washington Post
