'We emphasize learning by doing': Rice University students discover new wasp

The recently announced discovery of a new wasp species by biologists on the campus at Rice University received a most appropriate name, the team's lead said in a news release.

The new wasp, Neuroterus (noo-ROH’-teh-rus) valhalla, is about a millimeter long and spends 11 months of the year locked in a crypt, according to a Jan. 24 news release issued by the university in Houston.

"It would have been a missed opportunity to not call it something related to Rice or Valhalla," graduate student Pedro Brandão-Dias, lead author of the paper, said about the discovery published in in Systematic Entomology.

It was Brandão-Dias who first collected Neuroterus valhalla from branches of a massive live oak tree near the campus' graduate student pub, Valhalla, in spring 2018. Brandão, a native of Brazil had never seen an oak tree before his visit to Rice University in 2015 for an undergraduate research fellowship in the lab of evolutionary biologist Scott Egan. Egan is a corresponding author of the paper.

"At Rice, we emphasize learning by doing," Egan said in the news release. "In my lab, undergraduate and graduate students share in the experiential learning process by studying biologically diverse ecosystems on the live oaks right outside our front door. Armed with some patience and a magnifying glass, the discoveries are endless."

Neuroterus valhalla was the first insect species to be described alongside its fully sequenced genome, according to the news release. The Rice University researchers active in the news wasp's discovery are curious about how the tiny, non-stinging wasp may have been impacted by Houston’s historic freeze in February of last year.

While it is a newly named wasp species, its like is not so much a mystery. Neuroterus valhalla, like other gall wasps, fool their host tree into providing food and sheltering young wasps. The wasp lay her egg along with a biochemical cocktail that coax the tree into forming a sort of crypt, the "gall" for which the wasps are named, around the egg. The gall shelters the egg and then feeds larvae that ultimately hatches from the crypt.