For stinging, an adult female wasp was introduced into a terrarium together with an adult male cockroach and allowed to afflict the full stinging sequence, namely a thoracic sting followed by a head sting.
My head stung, pain pulsing around me like a halo.
If you find a seat at the packed bar, the bartender will offer you a taste of Bradley's bootleg limoncello, which is tart, sweet, and so strong it makes the top of your head sting.
A midday storm of worry, fear, and doubt beat down upon my head, stinging like hailstones.
Furthermore, Gal et al. [18] demonstrated that the wasp actively searches for, at least, the SupEG inside the cockroach's head capsule during the head sting.
Given these initial observations, A. compressa appears to actively search for the SEG inside the head capsule of its cockroach prey while delivering the head sting.
We propose this to be the case for the following reasons: (1) The wasp has been previously shown to use sensory feedback from its stinger to locate the SupEG within the cockroach head cavity when inflicting the head sting [18].
There was no significant difference between stinging durations of NC-cut and sham-operated cockroaches (p = 0.941), showing that elimination of descending cerebral inputs to the thorax is not sufficient, by itself, to increase the head sting duration.
In the present work, we show that this is not the case, since surgically removing the cockroach SEG prior to stinging, but not cutting the neck connectives without SEG removal, significantly increases the duration of the head sting.
If the cockroach's SEG plays a crucial role in the venom-induced hypokinesia, then one would expect the wasp to actively target not only the SupEG [18] but also the SEG during the head sting.
