This is an interesting setup — this wasp is actually a parasite of a parasite. She’s walking over this tree gall, seeing if she can lay her eggs in any of the parasitic insects living inside the gall! Galls (rounded protrusions of trunk or stem) form on plants when (usually, larval) insects burrow inside. The…
Tag: behavior
Spurge Spanworm Caterpillar (and Predator)
This spurge spanworm caterpillar (Oxydia vesulia) is expertly camouflaged as a stick, but that did not do it much good against the nest of tiny scorpions it happened to wander over. I saw the caterpillar on the wood and took a photo of it — and only saw the suspicious, grasping claws after enlarging the…
Leafcutter Ants
A column of leafcutter ants (could be Atta sp., could be Acromyrmex sp.) — possibly the coolest thing I saw in Costa Maya, Mexico. They formed a column a foot wide and more than a hundred feet long, something I’d seen in a thousand documentaries and never in person. I could hear David Attenborough narrating…