YELLOWSTONE'S WILD WORLD

You may have realized by now that I pay attention to all forms of life. In fact my all encompassing belief is that everyone has just as much right to exist as everyone else. When I say everyone I mean every living species on this earth. I also believe humans are, for the most part, ignoring many other species by destroying their habitat, polluting their air and water, and causing the extinction of many. Enough preaching.

Over the years we have taken many classes at the Teton Science School and The Yellowstone Institute. In fact three generations of our family have taken classes at the Teton Science School. About thirty years ago we took an animal behavior course from Al Stokes. He was a wonderful teacher and was one of Aldo Leopold’s (don’t know who Aldo Leopold is? Google him. It is important that you do.) graduate students and his wife, Alice, was Aldo Leopold’s secretary. They were both delightful people. Al Stokes showed us many examples of wonderful animal behavior that I would never had known about otherwise. One of my favorites was digger wasps. I hope you enjoy learning about digger wasps at least half as much as I did. There are a number of species of digger wasps and they all display some very interesting behavior. When a female digger wasp is ready to lay an egg she digs a hole. Then she looks for insects and spiders and injects them with a chemical that paralyzes them, but doesn’t kill them. She fills her hole with several paralyzed insects and/or spiders and then lays an egg in the hole. When the baby wasp hatches out Mom is nowhere to be found, but the food she has provided is still there, fresh, and ready to be eaten. In Al’s class we watched a digger wasp dig a hole and then bring back paralyzed insects and spiders. I don’t know exactly how the wasps find their hole but I do know that if you move the twigs and rocks around the hole she can’t find it. Our assignment in his class was to move a few rocks and twigs around a digger wasps hole, but remember where they were, and then watch how the digger wasp responds. We moved the rocks and the poor wasp couldn’t find her hole. Once we replaced the rocks and twigs to their original positions she found the hole just fine. And most of us don’t think insects are smart!

We have spent the last thirty years admiring digger wasps and making sure we never accidently kick a rock near their holes. We found one today while we were looking for steershead flowers on Mt. Washburn. We spent about 30 minutes watching her drag a spider to her hole. It took her that long because she had to stop frequently and find her hole.