Would a loving God create Tarantula Wasps?

Tom Smith (with relevant video):

These creatures sting spiders, paralyze them, carry off the still living bodies, lay an egg on them, which hatches into a larvae, which then eats the paralyzed spider alive, avoiding key body systems so as to make sure it stays alive until the last possible moment.  You really have to hope spiders have no awareness, or else that they are reincarnated Nazis or something.  As I have said before, Darwin apparently found the existence of God and parasitoid wasps incompatible.  An alternative that worries me sometimes is that God did create parasitoid wasps and thinks they're really cool.

It's not clear to me why the existence of parasites poses a novel problem. To the contrary, the questions Tom poses strike me as being wrapped up in the broader problem of theodicy. Indeed, all three of the main monotheistic religions have struggled with the paradox of a good God and an evil world.

To be sure, there's an argument that animal suffering is a particularly serious theological problem. In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis contended that "The problem of animal suffering is appalling; not because the animals are so numerous. . . but because the Christian explanation of human pain cannot be extended to animal pain. So far as we know beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue: therefore they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it." Lewis went on to develop a complex and nuanced theology of animal pain, which is well treated in this article.

At the end of the day, however, it matters not which form of evil you chose to focus on. The problem of pain is either an obstacle to faith or not. Much has been written to try to explain why one should come down on one side or the other of that fence. But if you were to read just one thing on theodicy, might I suggest The Problem of Pain?