Wasp can travel 100 miles in under two days

They measure just 1.5mm in size and are weak flyers but catch wind currents like "hopping on a bus" to get to their destination - which takes most of their short lives.

The fig wasps undertake the marathon trek in searching of trees to lay their eggs but also play a vital ecological role as figs provide very important food for vanishing species isolated by deforestation.

Biologist Dr Stephen Compton, of the University of Leeds, said: "They fly up in an air column and are then carried by wind until they sense host figs at which point they drop close to the ground and hunt out the scent of the tree which is specific to them.

"It is a bit like hopping on a bus, although they always have to travel downwind. It is the first time such a distant transportation has been identified in insects because we were able to track their pollen.

"They are nothing like the wasps that sting you in Britain although we also get very small species here too - but not this particular type that are unique to warm countries."

Using a unique mix of field work and genetic tests, the researchers tracked the movement of pollen between trees and used this as the marker for insect movement.

Dr Compton, whose findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said: "More birds and animals feed on fig trees than on any other plant in the rainforest. Our research shows that trees pollinated by this type of insect should be very resistant to forest fragmentation."

The scientists mapped all the African fig trees along 155 miles of the Ugab River valley in the Namib Desert. Due to the climate, the trees were only able to survive near the river, which made it possible to identify each of the 79 trees in the area individually.

Dr Compton said: "As adult wasps live for just 48 hours, they must have travelled these distances incredibly fast. It took our field scientists and volunteers nearly two weeks to walk 155 miles and map the fig trees used in the research."

The trees were DNA tested and seedlings grown from their fruit. Genetic tests on the seedlings enabled the researchers to identify which trees had cross pollinated. As the trees are only pollinated by the fig wasp Ceratosolen arabicus, the scientists were able to map the distances travelled by the insects.

Co researcher Professor Philip Gilmartin, now at the University of Durham, said: "This is the first research to identify each individual tree, rather than extrapolate the genetic mix from a sample."

The shortest distance recorded for cross pollination was 8.7 miles and the furthest 102 miles. Some pollen came from unidentified trees, indicating insects may have been travelling even longer distances than those recorded.

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