The Tarantula Hawk

I had the day off last Friday and thought it would be a good day to hang out with my parents for a few hours as I hadn't seen them in a while.
Dad showed me around the yard a bit where they were trying to nurse their yard back to life from an unfortunate gardening mishap. I noticed that there were a lot of these little round dug up areas in the flower beds and other bare spots around the yard. Dad said they thought perhaps some critter like an Armadillo or squirrel had been digging around but they weren't sure.
We had breakfast our on their back deck looking out over a valley and nature preserve and I noticed a puddle of sticky sap on the deck that Dad had covered with a paper towel to prevent us from walking through it. It was dripping out of a branch somewhere far up into this towering oak tree covering their deck. Dad wasn't sure where it might be coming from specifically so they could patch it up to prevent the sap from dripping out.
After breakfast and a trip to the vet (another story) I left and went home. A few hours later Mom calls me all excited that they had discovered what had been digging the holes in the yard. "An armadillo" I suggested... no, Mom says. It was a Tarantula Hawk Wasp. She said Dad had been looking up into the tree trying to pin point where the sap was coming from and saw a huge wasp buzzing around an area of the tree oozing some sap. He watched this wasp as it flew around the side of the house and starts to attack a tarantula.
They Googled it up to try to figure out what this huge wasp was that was bold enough to attack a tarantula and came across the Tarantula Hawk Wasp.
In an almost horror movie fashion. They attack tarantulas and paralyze them with a huge 1/3 in stinger. Once immobilized they drag them to these little burrows they dig, planting their egg on the spiders body. Then they bury them. When the egg hatches it burrows itself into the still living tarantula and begins to eat their juicy innards and leave the vital bits 'til last.

Here's a bit of video I found on YouTube.




Made me think of this critter Dad and I came across on the trail on our last Big Bend hiking trip.