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Project Noah Nature School
Manduca sexta
The progression of the parasitoidism of a tobacco hornworm. The first picture shows the larval wasps emerging from the hornworm's body. The second picture shows the wasps emerging four days later (on August 12), and then three days later (on August 15), after all the wasps had emerged from their cocoons. The last picture shows a few of the adult wasps after they have emerged.
For more about what happened to this caterpillar, go here: http://normalbiology.blogspot.com/2010/1...
Spotted on Aug 7, 2010
Submitted on Feb 5, 2011
6 Comments
Wow!!
Latimeria, thanks for posting the link to your blog - really excellent info! I had no idea the moths are so large!
The wonders of linking similar spottings on Noah! :) I saw that spotting too, it was very interesting: just the cocoons, but no body? I wonder what happened to it...
Latimeria is no coincidence, my message is recent. I found the ID of spotting my friend Mariajo (after much investigating on the internet): http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/774....
When she completed her spotting appeared in "Related spottings" yours, and I went to look ;)
Thanks, eulalia. It's amazing how once you see something like this once, you start noticing it everywhere. I was going back through some of my old pictures today and found a leaf-footed bug that had been parasitized, but I hadn't noticed it before. Wicked!
Very interesting. Nature never ceases to amaze. And your pictures are very good.