Evil-looking wasps munch Hawaii
America is under attack... but it won't be the lead story on the news tonight.
Happy-go-lucky Hawaii is being targeted by invasive western yellowjacket wasps who are chomping on everything from caterpillars to pheasants.
The wasps are flourishing on the islands after being accidently introduced in the 1960s and have been building nests the size of the back of a pickup truck which each contain colonies of 500,000 insects or more.
As well as the food, the yellowjackets are loving the sun.
Back in their natural habitat in the western USA the wasps die off in the winter, but the warmer climes of Hawaii mean they survive to feast again.
They only consume nectar, but kill prey to deliver protein to their growing broods.
A study from the University of California had a look at what the wasps have been eating and found to their surprise evidence of birds and lizards.
They mainly eat other insects, through, and are as vicious as they look - slicing up caterpillars while they're still alive or decapitating bees.
Weird Science Factoid: All of the Earth's continents are wider in the north than in the south. No-one knows why.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
