One Tiny Wasp Turns a Fig Tree Into a 150-Foot-High Eden. Birds, bats, monkeys by the dozen: A fruiting fig tree is a riot of life. It all goes back to the tree's ancient partnership with an insect.

However, wasps do not always pollinate the fig. Fig trees "punish" these "cheaters" by dropping unpollinated fruit, killing the wasp's offspring inside, report researchers. Share: Facebook Twitter ...

Here’s how it goes. When a female pollinator wasp manages to sniff out a receptive tree, she lands on an unripe fig and makes her way into a tiny passageway that leads to a hollow core.

Fig wasps and fig trees are mutually dependent, with each of the 800 or so modern species of tree pollinated by just one or two species of fig wasp that ignore other fig trees. The wasps – which ...

Those crunchies inside the figs are seeds, not wasp parts. And, if you’re wondering, fig jam is not sweet baby wasp paste. Nevertheless, vegans sometimes avoid figs since wasp critters are ...

(Beyond Pesticides, March 1, 2017) The Fig wasp is the pollinator of the month for March. A highly evolved pollinator crucial to the life cycle of the fig tree, the fig wasp is part of the chalcidoid ...

Tiny worms that live inside fig trees use the fig wasp as a 'vehicle' to hitch rides from one tree to another by crawling into the wasp's gut without harming it. This relationship has existed for ...

A female wasp pollinates the tiny flowers contained inside the hollow fig fruit, then lays eggs in some of the developing seeds. The larvae that hatch feed on some seeds but leave enough for the tree ...

Fig wasps are a tiny variety of wasps that pollinate, unsurprisingly, fig trees. They come in about 850 different varieties, each for the slightly different types of fig trees found in the rainforest.

Each fig contained about 400 flowers and each flower can feed one wasp larva. They found that, inside naturally growing figs, female wasps kill each other on a regular basis.

A Brazilian researcher describes 129 species of fig tree parasites which compete and even prey upon the fig wasps during the many phases of the fig-wasp mutualism that helped to shape both plant ...

Fig wasps are only two to three millimetres long and live an average of two to three days, but often fly 10 kilometres or more to get from a ripe tree to a flowering tree.