Abstract
Parasitoid wasps represent the plurality of venomous animals, but have received extremely little research in proportion to this taxonomic diversity. The lion’s share of investigation into insect venoms has focused on eusocial hymenopterans, but even this small sampling shows great promise for the development of new active substances. The family Pompilidae is known as the spider wasps because of their reproductive habits which include hunting for spiders, delivering a paralyzing sting, and entombing them in burrows with one of the wasp’s eggs to serve as food for the developing larva. The largest members of this family, especially the tarantula hawks of the genus Pepsis, have attained notoriety for their large size, dramatic coloration, long-term paralysis of their prey, and incredibly painful defensive stings. In this paper we review the existing research regarding the composition and function of pompilid venoms, discuss parallels from other venom literatures, identify possible avenues for the adaptation of pompilid toxins towards human purposes, and future directions of inquiry for the field.
Highlights
Venoms—toxic secretions from one organism that are introduced to the internals of another organism through a mechanical injury [1,2]—have evolved many times in the animal kingdom and several times in the insects alone [3,4,5,6]
All female hymenopterans are venomous and, as a result of their staggering diversity, they make up the plurality of venomous animals [8,9]
Most of this diversity within Hymenoptera is due to parasitic lineages which first arose in the Permian and have explosively diversified since [6,9,10,11,12]. While some of these species parasitize plants, most take advantage of arthropod hosts in some way for their larval development; this is usually fatal to the host and in that case the wasps are referred to as parasitoids rather than true parasites [10,11]
Summary
Venoms—toxic secretions from one organism that are introduced to the internals of another organism through a mechanical injury [1,2]—have evolved many times in the animal kingdom and several times in the insects alone [3,4,5,6]. In Aculeata, the ovipositor is used only for stinging and, as a result, has adapted to become a specialized venom delivery mechanism [38] While this comes at the cost of preventing aculeates from pursuing endoparasitic strategies, it allows the parasitoid lineages to subdue prey that is more active or better defended than the targets of nonaculeate parasitoids which virtually all attack soft or sedentary victims [39]. Pompilids reproduce by stinging a spider to paralyze it and dragging it across the ground (or the water in some exceptional cases [64]) to a burrow where an egg is deposited on it before being sealed in; when the larva hatches it consumes the paralyzed spider before pupating and emerging from the burrow as an adult [84,85,86]
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