Wasp vs Spider

The incredibly warm winter has made spring come early, as many people have commented. The bugs are out, and the flowers are in bloom, so we've been hiking a lot lately. My kids and I do quite a bit of hiking on the ridges near our house. Here is Trail 8 in Ta-ken, now redone with those odious, unsafe logs all the way to the top from the little wooden bridge at the base of the peak. Sucks. It's so easy to blow out a knee or twist an ankle if your foot slips between them.

As we were walking up the path across a large mass of concrete that served as both sidewalk and retaining wall, my son noted a huge spider sitting on the concrete, unmoving. "Is it dead?"
"Maybe...." I said.
Then I saw the wasp.
"Nope! Paralyzed."
We watched as the wasp flew in, grabbed the still feebly moving spider, and tried to pull it into a drainage hole in the concrete further down.

Unfortunately it dropped the spider about 4 meters down the concrete face. It flew down to retrieve it....

....and I shot this video of the wasp dragging the spider, much larger than itself, back up the nearly sheer concrete face and onto the path again. For some reason known only to itself, it insisted on having the spider in that exact place on the path.

Eventually it would lose the hole, drop the spider again, and quarter the area for 15 minutes trying to find the hole. We left in the middle of the drama.

[Taiwan]