Even though it’s dead and covered in a pile of amber, a new species of micro-sized wasp has been found, and it has some pretty interesting antennae. The tiny wasp was discovered preserved in a piece of amber from Myanmar and is thought to have lived in the middle of the Cretaceous period, about 100 million years ago.
The researchers decided that this specimen was a member of an entirely new genus and species and named it Carradiophyodus saradae, after the Greek words meaning head (land) and slit (diaphyodus) and inspired by scientist Sarada Krishnan.
This 1.3-millimeter-sized specimen belongs to a now extinct family of micro wasps. However, a significant portion of its length comes from mysterious, bulb-like structures at the tips of its antennae, a feature not seen in any other microbumblebee today.
“We have never seen any fossil or extant insects with such antenna structures,” George Poinar, lead author of the study describing the insect, said in a statement. In addition to its small size, “its 15-segmented antenna, deep slit in the middle of its head, and wing characters distinguish it from all other micro wasps.”
The antennae look like a pair of golden lungs.Researchers are not exactly sure how the wasp can fly with this strange body feature. “The unique, miniature cloud-like structures clinging to the antennae must certainly be a disturbance for this tiny parasite,” Poinar hypothesizes.
Poinar and study co-author Fernando Vega can only speculate about the purpose of this unusual feature because they cannot be compared to other insects with a similar structure.
“These could be small plant seeds, plant exudates, or the eggs of a host parasitized by the wasp,” Poinar theorizes. “Since there is a male bark louse embedded in the same piece of amber, there is a good chance the micro wasp parasitized the bark louse.”
Many micro wasps today are parasites. Fairy flies, whose names may not be appropriate, include the smallest known insects in the world, and they lay their eggs in the bodies of other insects.
Although the role of the strange structures possessed by these micro-wasps has yet to be revealed, Poinar emphasizes that this discovery is valuable in itself: “In any case, discovering them is one of the things that makes our job so interesting and challenging: dominant in extinct organisms, finding unique features.”
The research was published in Life magazine.
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