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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOEL SARTORE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PHOTO ARK
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By Rachael Bale, ANIMALS Executive Editor
“Anyone Recognize This Messenger of Death and Nightmares?” read the top post on my Nextdoor feed the other day. It came with a photo of a Very Large Wasp and the comment, “It stared into my soul and tried to kill me...I think.”
Of course, I clicked. What if those messengers of nightmares came to my house too? I stepped on a wasp once as a kid, and my dad had to carry me home. I didn’t want a repeat.
After some speculation in the comments, an entomology-wise neighbor wrote, “Cicada killer?” Yes, yes, others chimed in. It’s a cicada killer.
Thank the stars, the cicada killer wasp (pictured above) is one of those animals with a name and appearance that’s far scarier than it actually is. They’re big (up to two inches!), but they’re solitary, not aggressive, and pretty much only sting humans if you pick one up and start messing with it, Nat Geo’s Douglas Main tells me. That’s a relief, because not long after I learned this, I found one in my backyard.
Cicada killers really only care about cicadas, which they paralyze, bring to their underground burrows, and devour. Though they don’t eat periodical cicadas like those in Brood X that emerged en masse earlier this summer, they do come out each summer to dine on your standard annual cicadas.
Normally the wasps don’t cause much of a fuss, but recently, some entomologists have received worried reports from people who think they’ve spotted murder hornets—AKA Asian giant hornets—when they’re instead seeing cicada killers.
“You have to realize that these invasive ‘murder hornets’ only are found so far in the far northwest corner of Washington State,” Main says. “This mix-up doesn’t reveal a lack of intelligence—a close friend of mine who has two advanced degrees in virology swore he’d seen them in Connecticut, of all places. But it can be a wake-up call to learn more about the insects around you, which often have fascinating biological habitats and generally pose almost no threat to humans, like cicada killers.”
Don’t worry, we have you covered. Here’s all you need to know about cicada killers and how they’re so different from Asian giant hornets.
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