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fig wasp, (family Agaonidae), any of about 900 species of tiny, solitary wasps responsible for pollinating the world’s 900 species of figs (see Ficus). Each species of fig wasp pollinates only one species of fig, and each fig species has its own wasp species to pollinate it. This extraordinary diversity of coevolution between figs and wasps has become so profound that neither organism can exist without the other.

Wasps mature from eggs deposited inside the flowering structure of the fig, called the syconium, which looks very much like a fruit. Inside the completely enclosed syconium are the tiny, individual flowers themselves. When a wasp egg is deposited in one of the female flowers, that flower develops a gall-like structure instead of a seed. The blind, wingless male wasps emerge from the galls and search out one or more galls containing a female, and upon finding one, he chews a hole in the gall and mates with her before she has even hatched.