Friday Parasite #4: Up Close Parasite Encounters

Our Pandora sphinx caterpillar spent two days climbing around its jar and munching grape leaves. Then it stopped. It sat unmoving for another couple of days. It started looking a little baggy, like its skin was too big for it. I suspected I knew what was wrong.

On the morning of day 5, I walked into my office and discovered that my suspicions were all too correct. It wasn’t pretty, either.

                      

Unbeknownst to us, the caterpillar had been parasitized long before we found it, probably by a braconid wasp. The mother wasp had laid eggs under the caterpillar’s skin, and the parasitic larvae had been munching on its guts ever since. Now they were all grown up and ready to pupate. Some species of parasitic wasp pupate inside of their host and spare you the whole Alien-like experience. Unfortunately, this was one of the species that burst out of the caterpillar’s skin before they spin coccoons. I was willing to keep the larvae to see which species of wasp they’d become, but the child was rather upset and wouldn’t let me do it.

Comments

[Brian Rogers]

That's really rather gross. To think people once assumed that everything in nature was friendly.

[John]

I caught a tomato horn worm to which the same thing happened.

Normally my vast childhood curiosity would have resulted in me keeping it to see what kind of insect came out of the pupa however...

The thought of any creature burrowing through the skin of another creature after eating the insides just revolted me to no end and I smashed it. LOL

[Engr. Alexander S. Pascual]

Braconid can be produced at a minimal cost by small farmers. Host-rearing and mass-production take more or less 60 days and very similar to Trichogramma production.I believe braconid is one of the parasitoids that can control a wide-range of agricultural insects (i.e. larvae, eggs and nymphs.