Wasps? A Story.
This story gets its own post because it was an event.
07/26/24
I had the first Friday of that crazy busy (rural med) rotation remote. I needed to make some calls for the clinic, and can’t do that at home with all the chaos. I went to my school for the quiet morning and stayed to go to COMC (The MSK clinic that I used to staff) and get some tasks done on campus like following up on my TMJ project. Anyway, I’m going out to my car at the end of a Friday and I find an egg sac. I pick it up, something inside wiggles. Naturally, I must have it (I hope it’s a mantis egg ootheca!) I take it home and put it in one of my bug cups and then put the bug cup in the terrarium. Now we wait.
After nearly a month of waiting I gave up. The inner part didn’t wiggle anymore by the time I took it home and I was pretty sure it was dead. I kept the egg sac in the cup but removed it from the terrarium with the intention to cut it open in a few days. Days turned into weeks as I got progressively busier. The thing I love about entomology/biology is that you can let it wait for a little while. Especially in this case where the egg sac was dead - or so I thought.
08/08/24
It’s summer in San Antonio, so I thought nothing of the fly that was on my desk until my husband took a close look at it. “Ana, what is that?” “Probably a fly” I replied. “I don’t think so. Look at it!”
It was, in fact, a wasp. One of many wasps that were flying around my office. Oopsie! They had escaped from the container because they were small enough to fit through the air holes in the cup. I had purposely put them in an escapable cup so that they could go into the terrarium, but didn’t consider that the egg sac might still be alive after over a month of no movement. I caught the escaped wasps pretty easily and put the egg sac into a container with micropore tape so that the babies couldn’t escape until I knew what to do with them.
So what do I know at this point? They’re small (3mm) wasps that probably parasitized this mantis ootheca. An extensive internet search with images resulted in an ID of Conura wasp , which are stingerless. They are native to my region, so by all accounts I’m feeling pretty good about letting them go. My son helped me release the ones that had already emerged, and we left the egg sac outside for any stragglers.
A few weeks later I bring the egg sac inside, and cut it open to discover a single large pupae inside! I’ve reached the end of the road. I have no idea how to identify this pupae aside from its cocoon, the pupal image, and the Cornua wasps. Thankfully I already follow an entomology page and someone was easily able to identify the pupae! Drumroll please...
It belongs to the polyphemus moth!
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