Sphictostethus nitidus
species of insect
Sphictostethus nitidus, the golden hunter wasp or red spider wasp, is a species of pepsid spider wasp endemic to New Zealand.
Description
Females are reddish brown with yellow tints and with sooty spots; the males are also reddish brown with yellow-tinted wings, but these are never spotted. Females are 8.5-22.0 mm in length, and males 7.5-15.0 mm. They have a bold, jerky gait, and their vivid colour is aposematic to warn off visual predators such as birds and lizards. It is the only New Zealand Sphictostethus species that does not change from red to black when altitude or latitude increases. Its body stays red even at the most southern latitudes of its range.
Biology
S. nitidus hunts terrestrially in a variety of situations such as underneath and within logs, debris, and rotting wood, arboreally in shrubs and bushes, and on shingles and under boulders. The prey is usually detected by sight and pursued into the open. S. nitidus varies the attack depending on the species and size of spider. When Uliodon frenatus of any size is the prey, the wasp springs on to the back of the spider and stings the abdomen first before curving its abdomen and stinging the midventral region of the prosoma.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Sphictostethus nitidus” is species of insect. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Sphictostethus, nitidus and species, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sphictostethus nitidus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.