The Outside Story: Digger wasp – nature’s proficient providers Published: 7/22/2021 7:27:28 PM Last summer while working in the garden, I was startled when a fast-flying wasp dropped a plump pumpkin spider on the soil in front of me. The wasp landed, grabbed the spider, and wiggled backwards into a small hole I hadn’t noticed, quickly covering the entrance as if to say, “nothing to see here.” It was the first time I’d seen a digger wasp provisioning an underground nest. I learned about digger wasps in an introductory biology class. Niko Tinbergen, a Nobel Prize- winning Dutch biologist who helped develop the modern study of animal behavior through the mid-20th century, tested mother digger wasps’ instinctive navigation abilities. The wasp mothers he observed kept up to five nests, returning regularly to check on their larvae. They used patterns of landmarks to re-find their nest entrances but paid no attention to the exact nature of the landmark; so, if a nest had a circle of stones around it, the mother wasp would check for it within any nearby circular arrangement of similarly sized objects.