Ovipositor

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Ovipositor

The ovipositor is an organ

Organ (anatomy)

In biology, an organ is a biological tissue that performs a specific function or group of functions. Usually there is a main tissue and sporadic tissues....
used by some animal

Animal

Animals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the Kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life....
s for oviposition

Oviposition

Oviposition is the process of laying egg by Oviparity animals.Some arthropods, for example, lay their eggs with an organ called the ovipositor....
, i.e. the laying of eggs

Egg (biology)

In most birds and reptiles, an egg is the zygote, resulting from fertilization of the ovum. To enable incubation the egg is usually kept within a favourable temperature range as it nourishes and protects the growing embryo....
. It consists of a maximum of three pairs of appendages formed to transmit the egg, to prepare a place for it, and to place it properly.

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Encyclopedia

The ovipositor is an organ

Organ (anatomy)

In biology, an organ is a biological tissue that performs a specific function or group of functions. Usually there is a main tissue and sporadic tissues....
used by some animal

Animal

Oviposition

Oviposition is the process of laying egg by Oviparity animals.Some arthropods, for example, lay their eggs with an organ called the ovipositor....
, i.e. the laying of eggs

Egg (biology)

Insect

Insects are the biggest class of arthropods and the only ones with wings. They are the most diverse group of animals on the planet. They are most diverse at the equator and their diversity declines toward the poles....
s the organ is used merely to attach the egg to some surface, but in many parasitic species (primarily in wasp

WAsP

WAsP is a PC program for predicting wind climates, wind resources, and power productions from wind turbines and wind farms. The predictions are based on wind data measured at stations in the same region....
s and other Hymenoptera

Hymenoptera

Hymenoptera is one of the larger order s of insects, comprising the sawfly, wasps, bees, and ants. The name refers to the membranous wings of the insects, and is derived from the Ancient Greek language wikt:???? : membrane and wikt:pte??? : wing....
) it is a piercing organ as well. It is used by the grasshopper

Grasshopper

Grasshoppers are insects of the suborder Caelifera in the order Orthoptera. To distinguish them from Tettigoniidae, they are sometimes referred to as short-horned grasshoppers....
s to force a burrow in the earth to receive the eggs and by cicada

Cicada

A cicada is an insect of the order Hemiptera, suborder Auchenorrhyncha, in the superfamily Cicadoidea, with large eyes wide apart on the head and usually transparent, well-veined wings....
s to pierce the wood

Wood

Wood is an organic material; in the strict sense wood is produced as secondary xylem in the stems of woody plants, notably trees but also shrubs, etc....
of twigs for a similar purpose. Both long-horned grasshoppers

Ensifera

Ensifera is a suborder of the order Orthoptera, comprising insects commonly known as Cricket s, Tettigoniidae and Tettigoniidae. "Ensifer" means "sword bearer" in Latin, and refers to the typically elongated and blade-like ovipositor of the females....
and sawflies cut the tissues

Biological tissue

Tissue is a cellular organizational level intermediate between cells and a complete organism. Hence, a tissue is an ensemble of cells, not necessarily identical, but from the same origin, that together carry out a specific function....
of plant

Plant

Plants are Life organisms belonging to the Kingdom Plantae. They include familiar organisms such as trees, herbs, bushes, grasses, vines, ferns, mosses, and green algae....
s by means of the ovipositor. None of these examples is quite as remarkable as the wasp genus Megarhyssa
Megarhyssa

Megarhyssa is a genus of large ichneumon wasps, with some species known for having the longest ovipositors of any insects. They are idiobiont endoparasitoids of the larvae of wood-boring horntail wasps....
, the females of which have a slender ovipositor several inches long, used to drill into the wood of tree trunk

Tree Trunk

Tree Trunk is a song recorded and released in 1972 by The Doors.Tree Trunk was recorded by the surviving members of The Doors as they assembled material for their second and final album, Full Circle , following the death of Jim Morrison....
s. These species are parasitic in the larva

Larva

A larva is a young form of animal with indirect developmental biology, going through or undergoing metamorphosis .The larva can look completely different from the adult form, for example, a caterpillar differs from a butterfly....
l stage on the larvae of horntail

Horntail

Horntail or wood wasp is the common name for any of the 100 non-social species of the family Siricidae, of the order Hymenoptera, a type of xylophagous Symphyta....
wasps, hence the egg must be deposited directly into the host's body as it is feeding.

The sting of Hymenoptera (wasp

WAsP

Hornet

Hornets are the largest eusociality wasps, that reach up to 45 millimetres in length. The true hornets make up the genus Vespa, and are distinguished from other vespines by the width of the vertex , which is proportionally larger in Vespa; and by the anteriorly rounded gasters ....
s, bee

Bee

Bees are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants. Bees are a monophyly lineage within the superfamily Apoidea, presently classified by the unranked taxon name Anthophila....
s and some ant

Ant

Ants are Eusociality insects of the family Formicidae, and along with the related wasps and bees, they belong to the order Hymenoptera. Ants evolution from wasp-like ancestors in the mid-Cretaceous period between 110 and 130 million years ago and Evolutionary radiation after the rise of flowering plants....
s) is also an ovipositor, in this case highly modified and associated with poison

Poison

In the context of biology, poisons are Chemical substance that can cause disturbances to organisms, usually by chemical reaction or other activity on the molecular scale, when a sufficient quantity is absorbed by an organism....
gland

Gland

A gland is an Organ in an animal's body that synthesizes a substance for release such as hormones or breast milk, often into the bloodstream or into cavities inside the body or its outer surface ....
s (to paralyze the prey so that the eggs can be laid without the host fighting back, and probably also to suppress the host's immune system so that it can't destroy the eggs or shake off the paralysis). In virtually all stinging hymenopterans, the ovipositor is no longer used for egg-laying.

Some Roach

Roach (fish)

The Common Roach is a freshwater and brackish water fish native to most of Europe and western Asia. It is locally simply known as "the roach", but actually the fishes called "roach" can be any species of the genera Rutilus and Hesperoleucus depending on locality....
-like fish

Fish

A fish is any marine biology vertebrate animal that is typically ectothermic , covered with scale , and equipped with two sets of paired fins and several unpaired fins....
, such as bitterling

Bitterling

The 'Amur Bitterling', 'Rhodeus sericeus', is a small fish of the Cyprinidae. It is sometimes just called "bitterling", but this is wrong: for one thing, it dates back to the time when the European Bitterling was still considered conspecific with R....
s, have an ovipositor as a tubular extension of the genital orifice in the breeding season for depositing eggs in the mantle cavity of the pond mussel

Mussel

The common name mussel is used for members of several different families of clams or bivalve molluscs, from both saltwater and freshwater habitats....
.

Media depictions

The BBC documentary Walking with Dinosaurs
Walking with Dinosaurs

Walking with Dinosaurs was a six-part television series produced by the BBC, narrated by Kenneth Branagh, and first aired in the UK in 1999....
portrayed a Diplodocus
Diplodocus

Diplodocus is a genus of diplodocid sauropod dinosaur whose fossils were first discovered in 1877 by Samuel Wendell Williston. The generic name, coined by Othniel Charles Marsh in 1878, is a Neo-Latin term derived from Ancient Greek "double" and "beam", in reference to its double-beamed chevron located in the underside of the tail....
mother using an ovipositor to lay her eggs. However, there is no evidence that this was the case in real life.