The Australian cicada killer wasp, ''Exeirus lateritius'', the sole member of the

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial n ...

''Exeirus'', is a large, solitary, ground-dwelling,

predatory Predation is a biological interaction where one organism, the predator, kills and eats another organism, its prey. It is one of a family of common feeding behaviours that includes parasitism and micropredation (which usually do not kill t ...

wasp A wasp is any insect of the narrow-waisted suborder Apocrita of the order Hymenoptera which is neither a bee nor an ant; this excludes the broad-waisted sawflies (Symphyta), which look somewhat like wasps, but are in a separate suborder. Th ...

. It is related to the more common genus of cicada killers, ''

Sphecius Cicada killer wasps ( genus ''Sphecius'') are large, solitary, ground-dwelling, predatory wasps. They are so named because they hunt cicadas and provision their nests with them, after stinging and paralyzing them. Twenty-one species worldwide ...

''. In Australia, ''E. lateritius'' hunts over 200 species of

cicada The cicadas () are a superfamily, the Cicadoidea, of insects in the order Hemiptera (true bugs). They are in the suborder Auchenorrhyncha, along with smaller jumping bugs such as leafhoppers and froghoppers. The superfamily is divided into two ...

Habitat

The wasps occur in warm, dry areas where there are enough

tree In botany, a tree is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, usually supporting branches and leaves. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, including only woody plants with secondary growth, plants that are ...

s to support

s, such as the Murray-Darling basin, the south-east coast of the Australian mainland including Sydney, and

Tasmania ) , nickname = , image_map = Tasmania in Australia.svg , map_caption = Location of Tasmania in AustraliaCoordinates: , subdivision_type = Country , subdi ...

Predation method

''Exeirus lateritius'' stings and paralyses cicadas high in the trees, making them drop to the ground, from where the wasp moves them to its burrow, pushing with its hind legs, sometimes over a distance of a hundred meters. The paralysed cicada is placed on one of many shelves in a "

catacomb Catacombs are man-made subterranean passageways for religious practice. Any chamber used as a burial place is a catacomb, although the word is most commonly associated with the Roman Empire. Etymology and history The first place to be referred ...

", to form the food-stock for the wasp grub which grows out of the egg deposited there., sometimes as deep as 60 cm underground

References

Crabronidae Apoidea genera Monotypic Hymenoptera genera Hymenoptera of Australia {{Apoidea-stub