Mecoptera is a minor insect order with only 27 known species found in Australia. Members of this order are often called ‘scorpionflies’ or ‘scorpion flies’ because males of the family Panorpidae (which doesn’t occur in Australia) have curving genital segments resembling a scorpion sting (below).
Cuckoos & cleptos
Most of us are familiar with the activities of avian cuckoos where a bird lays its eggs in the nest of a host bird of a different species, after kicking out the eggs that were laid by the host. We have a dozen or so species of cuckoos in Australia and some of them utilise the nests of birds half their size. The worst mismatch I have seen was a pair of exhausted Superb Blue Wrens (Malurus cyaneus) trying to feed a massive fledgling Fan-tailed cuckoo (Cuculua pyrrhophanus). The young cuckoo was never happy with the amount of food brought to it and constantly pecked its foster parents.
Did you know there are insect cuckoos too? Granted there’s not a lot of the bullying going on like in the bird example described above, but there is certainly similar amounts of clandestine behaviour. There are about 75 species in the wasp family Chrysididae in Australia, with common species being referred to as “cuckoo wasps”. They vary in length from about 6 mm to 22 mm in length and they are strikingly beautiful insects because of their metallic colours.
