Motherhood in nature is often imagined through mammals: nursing, guarding, carrying, and staying close. A 2025 study of digger wasps offers a less familiar version.
Female Ammophila pubescens wasps do not raise their young in a nest full of siblings. Each offspring gets its own hidden burrow in the sand. The mother digs the burrow, seals it, stocks it with a paralyzed caterpillar, lays a single egg, and then returns as the larva grows to add more food. While doing this, she may be caring for several young at once, each buried in a different place and at a different stage of development.
The behavior is more intricate than it first appears. Researchers found that these wasps can remember the precise locations of as many as nine active nests at the same time. They usually feed their offspring in order of age, without having to open and inspect every nest first. When the oldest larva has already received a larger first food item, the mother can delay the next feeding, apparently using a later assessment visit to judge how much food remains. In other words, she is not simply acting on instinct in a fixed sequence. She is keeping track of several hidden young at once, each with its own place in the queue.
The paper’s authors — Jeremy Field, Charlie Savill, & William A. Foster — frame this as evidence that an insect with a miniature brain can use surprisingly sophisticated memory to manage parental care in the wild. That matters partly because the stakes are real. A mother that opens the wrong nest, feeds the wrong larva, or mistimes a visit can lose offspring to starvation or parasites.
For Mother’s Day, there is no need to make wasps sound sentimental. The finding is interesting enough on its own. Maternal care, in this case, can be thought of as logistics under pressure: memory, risk and labor are all part of the job. It is a demanding form of care, carried out by an animal we rarely think of as devoted.
Motherhood in nature is more varied, and often more exacting, than the human images we bring to it.
Banner image: Motherhood in nature is easy to see in mammals, like these ring-tailed lemurs in Anja, Madagascar. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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