The Cynipoidea are a moderate-sized

hymenoptera Hymenoptera is a large order of insects, comprising the sawflies, wasps, bees, and ants. Over 150,000 living species of Hymenoptera have been described, in addition to over 2,000 extinct ones. Many of the species are parasitic. Females typic ...

n superfamily that presently includes five modern families and three extinct families, though others have been recognized in the past. The most familiar members of the group are

phytophagous A herbivore is an animal anatomically and physiologically adapted to eating plant material, for example foliage or marine algae, for the main component of its diet. As a result of their plant diet, herbivorous animals typically have mouthpar ...

, especially as

gall Galls (from the Latin , 'oak-apple') or ''cecidia'' (from the Greek , anything gushing out) are a kind of swelling growth on the external tissues of plants, fungi, or animals. Plant galls are abnormal outgrowths of plant tissues, similar to be ...

-formers, though the actual majority of included species are

parasitoid In evolutionary ecology, a parasitoid is an organism that lives in close association with its host (biology), host at the host's expense, eventually resulting in the death of the host. Parasitoidism is one of six major evolutionarily stable str ...

s or

hyperparasitoid A hyperparasite, also known as a metaparasite, is a parasite whose host, often an insect, is also a parasite, often specifically a parasitoid. Hyperparasites are found mainly among the wasp-waisted Apocrita within the Hymenoptera, and in two ...

s. They are typically glossy, dark, smooth wasps with somewhat compressed bodies and somewhat reduced wing venation. It is common for various

metasoma The metasoma is the posterior part of the body, or tagma, of arthropods whose body is composed of three parts, the other two being the prosoma and the mesosoma. In insects, it contains most of the digestive tract, respiratory system, and cir ...

l segments to be fused in various ways (often diagnostic for families or subfamilies), and the petiole is very short, when present. With the exception of the

Cynipidae Gall wasps, also incorrectly called gallflies, are hymenopterans of the family Cynipidae in the wasp superfamily Cynipoidea. Their common name comes from the galls they induce on plants for larval development. About 1,300 species of this gener ...

(the gall wasps), it is a poorly known group as a whole, though there are nearly 3000 known species in total, and a great many species are still undescribed, mostly in the

Figitidae Figitidae is a family of parasitoid wasps. The full diversity of this wasp family is not yet known, but about 1400 species have been described to over 130 genera. For example, the largest subfamily, Eucoilinae (previously considered as a separa ...

. Each of the constituent families differs in biology, though life histories of one of the families (

Liopteridae Liopteridae is a family of wood-boring parasitoid wasp Parasitoid wasps are a large group of hymenopteran superfamilies, with all but the wood wasps ( Orussoidea) being in the wasp-waisted Apocrita. As parasitoids, they lay their eggs on ...

) are still largely unknown. In July 2020 an identification key for the superfamily was published in the journal ''Insect Systematics and Diversity'', enabling identification to the family level.

References

Apocrita superfamilies Hymenoptera superfamilies {{Apocrita-stub