Golden creature emerges on a Texas college campus, researchers say. It’s a new species
A student on a Texas university campus made a unique discovery — a creature with a "goldenrod color" and "dark brown markings" — that turned out to be a new species of wasps, researchers said.
Chrysonotomyia susbelli is about 1 millimeter in length with a depth of physical detail, photos from a Sept. 18 study published in ZooKeys show.
Its pink eyes span most of the creature's pale yellow head while "incomplete dark transverse bands" cover the wasp's golden body, researchers described. Males have two of these "incomplete" bands while females have three, the study said.
"The wasp's goldenrod color is almost identical to the official colors of Wiess College, my residential college," Brendan O'Loughlin, Rice University senior and discoverer of the new species, said in a Sept. 18 news release. O'Loughlin is also the first author on the study.
This is the sixth species discovered in the Chrysonotomyia genus from North America and the fourth wasp species to be found on Rice University's campus in Houston in the past seven years, researchers said.
The wasps come out of a "microhabitat" of "tumorlike growths" made by a gall wasp species that lives on oak leaves on the campus, according to the news release.
Researchers collected the gall wasps in March 2023 and the new species — Chrysonotomyia susbelli — emerged out of the galls within two months, according to the study.
This new species is "the first of the entire genus confirmed to attack cynipid gall wasps, and the first in a confirmed association with oaks in the genus," according to the study.
"Free-living adult individuals" were collected from the leaves, which were used for a genetic analysis to confirm the unique species, the study said.
As of the publishing date, the species is only known to live on Rice University's campus, but scientists believe the wasps could be found along the Gulf Coast and across southern parts of the United States.
"You don't have to travel to a distant rainforest to find new and beautiful things — you just have to step outside and look," Rice University researcher Scott Egan said in the release.
The research team includes O'Loughlin, Pedro F. P. Brandão-Dias, Michael W. Gates and Egan.
