Parasitoid wasp (Scelionidae) chews its way out of a moth egg at The Caterpillar Lab! View in HD for best results.

When we collect wild moth and butterfly eggs, what ends up hatching out in the lab is not always what we were expecting. These double-toothed prominent eggs (last week's Caterpillar of the Week) sat in our nursery for over ten days without hatching - a sign that something fishy is going on within. It was lucky timing that we just happened to examine their container at the moment a tiny parasitoid wasp began to emerge from an egg.

Egg parasitism is very common in the world of insects and many of the wild collected eggs we attempt to hatch yield these wasps rather than the caterpillars they were originally intended to produce. In some species, like the larger sphinx moths, you can look through the egg shell and actually see parasitoid wasps developing and eventually moving around the interior of the egg as they prepare to emerge.

We find parasitism to be totally fascinating at The Caterpillar Lab - do you have any stories to share about a time you witnessed a similar event?

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(c) Sam Jaffe

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