Carlos Perez Couto / Wikimedia Commons Serra dos Órgãos National Park, Rio de JaneiroCarlos Perez Couto / Wikimedia Commons
Darwin wasps are named after English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882), who wrote to a botanist friend expressing his indignation at the idea that the “benevolent and omnipotent God” in which he still believed could have created parasitic insects whose larvae fed on the bodies of living caterpillars. It was previously thought that they could only live in mild climates. However, researchers from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and the Brazilian National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) who captured 1,560 wasps at altitudes of 110 to 2,169 meters (m) in an area of the Serra dos Órgãos National Park, Rio de Janeiro, identified 24 species of the subfamily Pimplinae that have not yet been described. In the mountains of Rio, species diversity was greater at lower altitudes, declining as altitude increased. In 2020, biologists from the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) found 91 species of Pimplinae in the Serra do Japi Biological Reserve in Jundiaí, in the interior of São Paulo State. In 2017, an expedition to the Peruvian Amazon discovered another 105. It is estimated that around 60,000 species are part of the Ichneumonidae family, of which 24,000 have been described (Insects, November 2023; Brazilian Journal of Biology, April 2020; Insect Conservation and Diversity, December 2017).
FLINTE, V. et al. Insects. 2023 Female wasps collected in Serra dos Órgãos: from left to right, Pimpla caerulea, Neotheronia sp., and Dolichomitus megalourusFLINTE, V. et al. Insects. 2023
