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Mother of all wasps
Hello Bugman,
I took these photo’s earlier, because I’ve never seen anything like this before. According to your answers it appears to be some kind of wood wasp. And – big clue, it’s standing on a piece of wood! It apperared to be injecting the wood (a recently felled tree) with a giant black 1 inch long needle thingy (to use the technical expression). Can you tell me what it is please. And more importantly, do I win a prize? Excellent Website by the way. Kind regards,
Andrew

Hi Andrew,
Probably our biggest peeve with regards to letters we receive is a gorgeous photo of a questionable insect when no location is provided. If the photo is blurry, we can just hit delete without responding rather than to waste our precious posting time, but when the photo is as fine as yours, we feel compelled to post it. You may or may not respond with a location, which will help our readership, but will take additional time from posting additional submissions. We get letters from all over the world, and many species look remarkable similar. We believe this is an Oregon Horntail, Urocerus gigas, but if you are in South Africa, that is probably incorrect. The Oregon Horntail is a Wood Wasp. Perhaps Eric Eaton can verify your identification sans location.

Hello Daniel,
Thanks for your reply. I’m sorry about not giving you my location, but when I sit at my laptop, I assume that the rest of the world is sitting just behind the screen! A silly mistake. My location is North Yorkshire, England, UK. I’ve attached the other photo’s, sorry about the inevitable long download time. I hope they’re worth it. Kind regards,
Andrew

Thanks for the clarification Andrew. We found a website, UK Safari, that indicates the Wood Wasp, Urocerus gigas, is “fairly common throughout the UK.” Now we will need to research if the UK individuals are a different subspecies, if one or the other population was introduced, or if they are in fact native to both continents. At any rate, this is all very interesting.

Update: (07/24/2008)
Hi, Daniel:
Your reply on WTB was quite correct: Urocerus gigas is one of those “holarctic” species found on both continents (North America and Eurasia).
Eric

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