Other fig wasps are now included in the families Epichrysomallidae, Eurytomidae, Melanosomellidae, Ormyridae, Pteromalidae, and Torymidae.

This is the reverse of sex-linked functions in Strepsiptera and bagworms, where the male has wings and the female never leaves the host.

Many species have extremely long ovipositors, so that they can deposit eggs from the outside of the syconium (Subtribe Sycoryctina of Otitesellini[5] and Subfamily Sycophaginae[6]).

Others have evolved to enter the syconium in the same way as the Agaonidae, and now resemble the pollinators morphologically (Subtribe Sycoecina of Otitesellini).

Contrary to popular belief, ripe figs are not full of dead wasps and the "crunchy bits" in the fruit are only seeds.

[11] Though the lives of individual species differ, a typical pollinating fig wasp life cycle is as follows.

At the beginning of the cycle, a mated mature female pollinator wasp enters the immature "fruit" (actually a stem-like structure known as a syconium) through a small natural opening (the ostiole) and deposits her eggs in the cavity.

After mating, a male wasp begins to dig out of the fig, creating a tunnel through which the females escape.

[12][13][14] Since then, cocladogenesis and coadaptation on a coarse scale between wasp genera and fig sections have been demonstrated by both morphological and molecular studies.

[14] Such strict cospeciation should result in identical phylogenetic trees for the two lineages[13] and recent work mapping fig sections onto molecular phylogenies of wasp genera and performing statistical comparisons has provided strong evidence for cospeciation at that scale.