Potentially hundreds of new species of wasp have been discovered by scientists working on one of the largest environmental research projects ever undertaken in Ireland.
The project, which is attempting to measure the impact of farming on plant, insect and animal wildlife, discovered 85 "genera" of the tiny parasitic creatures which were the inspiration for the film Alien.
The wasps have also emerged as one of the best indicators of animal and plant wildlife health in Irish farmland.
The huge numbers of the tiny creatures were discovered by the Ag-biota project, a 1.4 million, five-year study measuring biodiversity in Ireland.
The 85 genera could contain numerous species but, with very little currently known about the wasps, further research is required to identify how many new species there are in the samples collected by the project.
The project, which is funded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has also identified 60 species of bird, 40 of spider and more than 100 of beetles in its first two years.
The wasps, which range in size from two millimetres to two centimetres, are parasitic and feed on other insects.
"These are not your big stinging wasps. These are minute little enemies of other insects," Dr Gordon Purvis, director of the project, told The Irish Times.
They inject their eggs into the body of host insects, like the extraterrestrial creature in the Alien series of films starring Sigourney Weaver.
"When it's finished it will pupate into an adult wasp and will burst out of the dead husk of the insect," said Dr Purvis.
Although these parasitic wasps have been known to exist since the 1700s, research on them in Ireland or Britain has been limited.
The British Museum, which has one of the most comprehensive records of biological specimens, had records of only three species of parasitic wasp found in these islands.
"Nobody has looked before," Dr Purvis said about the discovery.
"Ironically, the British Museum can identify these things from Borneo and Central America, and they can't identify them from ryegrass fields in Wexford."
Because there are so many species, which each feed on a different type of insect, Dr Purvis and the other scientists plan to use the wasps to help measure the overall environmental health of an area.
Initial results from the study have indicated that the EU's rural environmental protection scheme for farmers does little to encourage biodiversity.