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Natural History

 

All female pompilids live by three basic tenets (Wasbauer 1995): a) they use spiders as prey, although not all species capture their own prey and some are opportunistic (Austin et al. 2004); b) a nest cell is provisioned with a single spider host, and c) only one egg is laid on each host. Even though spider wasps are seemingly uniform in their biology, they exhibit consider­able diversity in ethological types (Evans 1953; Evans & Yoshimoto 1962; Wasbauer 1995), with behaviors such as prey-carrying mecha­nisms, nesting habitat, and nesting sequences often differing between genera and occasionally between species.