We’ve all heard the old adage that the only thing that will survive a nuclear war is the cockroach. Spawned from the fact that cockroaches are notoriously hard to kill with most other methods, it does seem like a plausible scenario. It turns out however, that they are actually pretty bad at not dying to gamma radiation. It takes roughly 600-1000 rads to kill a human and, while it takes much more to actually kill it, a roach becomes sterile after ~1000 rads itself. So as the last human inhales his last breath before being irradiated to death he can comfort himself in knowing that the infamous pests are soon to follow.

Then he could exhale in a scream knowing that the true inheritors of Earth are freaking parasite wasps. Habrobracon, a member of the Braconidae family is our current having-your-atoms-ionized-without-experiencing-a-horrible-death champion ringing in at 180,000 rads before dieing. “But wait” you say, “if this wasp is a parasite wouldn’t it’s hosts just die and by proxy the wasp would perish as well?”. Unfortunately, we aren’t off the hook that easily. One of the other insects I’ve been able to find radiation stats on is the fruit fly which can stand up to a respectable 64,000 rads. If you take a look at the favoured hosts of the Braconidae, you’ll notice fly larvae in there amongst many other insects (all of which are reasonable at surviving radiation on account of their cells not dividing constantly like vertebrates).

How do we know that these wasps take this ridiculously high amount of radiation to kill? 180,000 rads is a lot to be throwing around the lab unprotected and making a big lead shield is way too obvious. Pay attention, because this is why I love the human race. What we did was put them inside a screen, put the screen inside a rocket, blasted it into orbit, then bombarded them with gamma radiation, just to see what happened.

Speaking of seeing what happened, imagine being up on the international space station when the nukes start flying and everything on earth is hit almost uniformly with ~170,000 rads. You jump (float) into your space shuttle and head back to earth  to survey the damage. As you step out onto the brown and barren Earth, you can hear nothing aside from the whistling of the wind and the buzzing of the wasps.

-Wolverox