A tarantula hawk is not a hawk, but a giant wasp that lives in California’s deserts. An expectant female can be up to four inches long, and when the time comes, she pounces on the nearest tarantula, which is also native to deserts lit orange at night by the glow of Los Angeles. She paralyzes the spider with her half-inch stinger, then drags the prostrate arachnid to an underground lair where she lays a single white egg on it. The egg hatches after five days, and the infant wasp dines on its hapless victim for about a month, craftily saving the organs for last so that the spider remains alive—and fresh.
As luck would have it, we did not encounter any four-inch-long wasps while testing the 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee, which is fine because a tarantula hawk’s sting rates on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index as feeling “blinding, fierce, shockingly electric, [like a] running hair dryer has been dropped in your bubble bath.”
Keep Reading: 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo V6 4×4 – Road Test. Linked by DCH Chrysler Jeep Dodge of Temecula
No comments:
Post a Comment