Lacewing Larva with its Trash Packet

Description:

This tiny 3 mm piece of fluff was moving about on a leaf. It is the "Trash Packet" (as Neuroptologists call it) of a Lacewing Larva. In the second picture you can see its little sickle-shaped mandibles protruding from the front of the packet. The 3rd picture is a side view and the mandibles and legs are visible as it is walking. I turned it over (to its minuscule extreme fury) and you can see the whole underside of the larva in the last 3 pictures. These are predators and skewer their prey with their mandibles and then suck out the fluids. Lacewing larvae are also unique in that they have an incomplete digestive system and are unable to expel waste material until after they pupate. The collected dark waste in the larva is called meconium and is visible in the pictures. While upside-down, I saw that it could not free itself from its trash packet. It turns out that these larvae have long specialized and branched setae on the thorax and abdomen especially for the collection of silk and trash objects for camouflage purposes. (See this reconstruction of a larvae without its trash, to admire the specialized setae: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Reco...). Also unique, is that they produce this silk from modified malphigian tubules which normally serve as a kind of kidneys for cleaning the hemolymph in other insects. The fluffy white stuff holding the pieces of trash are these silk threads. These tiny creatures that are specialized in so many ways are extremely ancient, dating back to the Permian! Family Chrysopidae of the Neuroptera.