The undergrowth is dank. Oppressing, like a turgid soup stirred up from murk and rot. Lurking amidst the decomposing bracken, I am a monstrous killing machine, poised on eight hydraulic limbs, each covered in trichobothria, microscopic bristles, all the better to sense the vibration of this understory I prowl.

Today, I hide rather than stalk. All around, the air is vibrating, a low-frequency dirge hum pumping into the very epicentre of my exoskeleton. She’s out there. A pompilid. Somewhere. I cannot see her, even with all eight eyes scanning, so I morph ever so slowly into the faultline crevices of a dead blackwood’s bark.

Then she is there. A flicker of iridescent blue-black, orange wings a-blur, like a short-circuit in the shadows. There is no rush, only cold contemplation, as she lands, with the rhythmic precision of a terminator drone.

This was never going to be a brawl. She matrixes through my defences, a blur of chitinous armour and predatory intent. I lunge wildly, pedipalps flailing, mandibles dripping with wasted venom, She darts under my guard, executing her strike with surgical precision, like a serial killer anaesthetist. A spike of white-hot ice sears into my abdomen.

Electrochemical signals jangle my nervous system, a rush of digital noise. Then the paralysis sets in. Complete. Total. I am imprisoned within my own exoskeleton, my biological processor metronomic, the physiological hardware fried.

She grips me with a terrifying tenderness, and sets off on the interminable trek to her fossorial burrow. I feel every scrape and bump as she drags me through the grit, to a shallow hole in the ground. The smell, when she deposits me, is that of a damp grave.

And that is the horror of the design. Pompilidae wasps don’t kill us spiders. Before she buries me, she turns to oviposit her eggs into my soft tissue, leaving these ticking timebombs to birth the next generation deep inside me.

I fathom the merciless brilliance of this Darwinian equation.

I am not prey. I am fresh, living biomass. A battery for larvae that will unhurriedly consume my haemolymph and non-vital organs. I will feel them gnawing and ripping into me from my body cavity, all the while watching the terrifying darkness closing in.

Time to die. But not yet. Not for a long, long time …

FOR THE NERDS:

The Pompilidae family consists of up to 5000 species of known wasps (yes, that’s with three zeros). Also known as spider wasps, spider-hunting wasps, or pompilid wasps, many of the species are solitary, and nearly all survive by capturing and paralyzing their prey. In South Africa, they generally hunt rain spiders (Genus Palystes), huntsman spiders (Family: Sparassidae), or other arachnid species.

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