Nitric oxide radicals are emitted by wasp eggs to kill mold fungi

We have conducted an additional experiment to assess whether NO can be responsible for the strong antifungal effect of the gas emitted by beewolf eggs. Moreover, comparison of the hazard ratio (the appropriate measure of effect size for such survival analyses) calculated for this experiment and a similar experiment that was previously conducted with beewolf eggs instead of synthetic NO revealed similar values with mutually overlapping 95% confidence intervals. Thus, our results show that (i) beewolf eggs produce incredibly high concentrations of NO, while (ii) NO emission from paralyzed bees (if it indeed occurs at all, which seems very unlikely given that NO emission has never been shown previously for an adult insect) are ecologically negligible.

Source: elifesciences.org