Well, about wasps, actually. Last summer I noticed on my picknick table the sight of a very fat and larger than usual wasp attached with it’s back end to a much smaller darker insect.
At first I thought I was witnessing a mating, that the smaller insect was a male and that the big one was the queen. But then I noticed that after they disconnected the smaller insect was pumping up its wings from very small and crumbled to hard and able to fly with, just like a butterfly does when it comes from its cocoon. It seemed that this large wasp had given birth to the smaller insect! I do use the word ‘seemed’, because that’s not possible, is it? Does anyone know what was going on here?
No, it’s not possible it was a birth. Although some insects give birth to live young rather than eggs, none are born with functional wings. Young wasps don’t even resemble insects, they are essentially maggots.
However wasps have some bizarre life cycles. In some species the males do seek out the females as soon as the pupate, so it’s possible that this was a female that had sought out a male as soon as it had pupated. I don’t know enough about North Am wasps to say whether such a thing exists, but I a unaware of it if it does.
A more likely explanation is that you witnessed some form of parasitism. Many wasps lay there eggs in the bodies of other live insects. For the larger wasps this is usually done after the insect has been stung and paralysed. Many smaller wasps don’t bother and just lay there eggs in the insect and let it be eaten alive as it walks around. You have probably seen a female laying eggs in a newly pupated insect. Tough break for the victim.
I think the mating immediately after emergence theory has more merit than the parasitism one - the males of some species of wasps actually mate with the females before they emerge as adults.
I notice on review that Kip is form the Netherlands, not North America. Not that it helps much, I am even more ignorant of Dutch entomology.
It is also possible that it wasn’t a wasp at all, but some kind of wasp-mimic moth.
Thanks Blake and Mangetout, for your suggestions. Are there any entomoligists who have other ideas out there?
Maybe it was something hatching from a shell? Not a wasp, but some other sort of critter that undergoes metamorphosis and leaves its old exoskeleton behind?