- British actor Idris Elba has been nominated for four Golden Globe Awards and five Primetime Emmy Awards in addition to being named one of the “Sexiest Men Alive.” Now he’s been awarded an accolade that even he probably never dared aspire to: a parasitic wasp has been named in his honor.
- The genus Idris was first described in 1856 and today includes more than 300 species of wasp, all of which have only been known to parasitize spider eggs. Idris elba, on the other hand, was discovered in Mexico parasitizing the eggs of an invasive stink bug known as the bagrada bug (Bagrada hilaris), an invasive species native to Africa.
- Idris elba could potentially be a valuable part of natural solutions to controlling the B. hilaris population, as opposed to the insecticides currently in use, and reining in the destruction the stink bugs do to crops.
British actor Idris Elba has been nominated for four Golden Globe Awards and five Primetime Emmy Awards in addition to being named one of the “Sexiest Men Alive.” Now he’s been awarded an accolade that even he probably never dared aspire to: a parasitic wasp has been named in his honor.
The wasp was recently discovered in Guanajuato, Mexico and described to science in a paper published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research this week by a team of researchers with Mexico’s Colegio de Postgraduados, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and the Florida State Collection of Arthropods in the US.
The genus Idris was first described in 1856 and today includes more than 300 species of wasp, all of which have only been known to parasitize spider eggs. Idris elba, on the other hand, was discovered in Mexico parasitizing the eggs of an invasive stink bug known as the bagrada bug (Bagrada hilaris), an invasive species native to Africa that is a major pest in India, southern Europe, southern Asia, and the Middle East. Bagrada bugs made their Western Hemisphere debut in 2008 when they were first sighted in Los Angeles, California, and have since become an important pest of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, kale, and turnips in North and South America, having been spotted in Chile in 2016.
Dr. Refugio Lomeli-Flores of the Colegio de Postgraduatos and his team were the first to observe an Idris elba individual emerging from a bagrada bug egg in Guanajuato, much to their surprise. Dr. Tara Gariepy of the governmental agency Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada then used molecular forensics to match the DNA of the adult wasp with the DNA it left in the bagrada bug egg to independently confirm that Lomeli-Flores and team had seen what they thought they had seen: Idris elba is a parasitoid, an insect whose larvae parasitize and eventually kill their host organism, of bagrada bug eggs.
“This is the first association of an Idris species with a non-spider host, and the association is confirmed with molecular diagnostic tools that enable identification of parasitoid and host from the remains of parasitized eggs,” chief author Lomeli-Flores and co-authors write in the paper describing Idris elba to science.
Specimens of the wasp were later sent to Dr. Elijah Talamas of the Florida State Collection of Arthropods, a taxonomist who determined that the specimens did, in fact, belong to a previously unknown species.
In explaining the etymology of the scientific name they chose for the wasp, Lomeli-Flores and co-authors merely write: “The epithet ‘elba’ is an arbitrary combination of letters that is to be treated as a noun in apposition.” In a statement, Talamas elaborated on the choice, somewhat, noting that were the species to be explicitly named after Idris Elba the Homo sapiens, it would then be a patronym, and thus, following Latin grammar rules, the wasp would have to be called Idris elbai. Treating the second name as merely “an arbitrary combination of letters,” however, avoided the grammar issue — and Idris elba was ready for its close up.
It is uncommon for a native parasitoid species, like Idris elba, to attack a foreign organism introduced to its habitat, which makes it all the more remarkable that an Idris wasp has adapted to parasitize the eggs of bagrada bugs. The researchers believe this could simply be a happy accident: bagrada bugs, unlike other stink bugs, lay their eggs in the soil instead of on plants, and the wasps may have somehow mistaken them for spider eggs, their typical host. “This may be a case of accidental parasitism by I. elba, based on chance encounters with B. hilaris eggs in the same habitat as its typical spider host,” the researchers write.
They also theorize that Idris wasps could have a broader host range than scientists knew, one that includes both spiders and insects. More research is needed to answer this question, especially since Idris elba could potentially be a valuable part of natural solutions to controlling the B. hilaris population, as opposed to the insecticides currently in use, and reining in the destruction the stink bugs do to crops.
Meanwhile, there’s no word yet on when Idris Elba will be receiving his bronzed Idris elba specimen so that he can place it next to his Golden Globe.
CITATION
• Lomeli-Flores, J. R., Rodríguez-Rodríguez, S. E., Rodríguez-Levya, E., González-Hernández, H., Gariepy, T. D., & Talamas, E. J. (2019). Field studies and molecular forensics identify a new association: Idris elba Talamas, sp. nov. parasitizes the eggs of Bagrada hilaris (Burmeister). Journal of Hymenoptera Research, 73, 125. doi:10.3897/jhr.73.38025
