Use this simple photographic trick to make tiny insect eggs look enormous
Step 1. Wait at the eggs for a parasitoid wasp to arrive. Step 2. Photograph the wasp laying her own eggs into her target, like so: Step 3: Marvel at how a fully developed wasp in all her intricate detail is an order of magnitude smaller than the egg of a butterfly.
Step 1. Wait at the eggs for a parasitoid wasp to arrive.
Step 2. Photograph the wasp laying her own eggs into her target, like so:
Step 3: Marvel at how a fully developed wasp in all her intricate detail is an order of magnitude smaller than the egg of a butterfly.
What's going on here?
Scarcely any resource in nature goes untapped by some other organism looking to eat it. Small size is not a complete defense. Insect eggs, diminutive though they are, are plagued by even tinier insect parasites that develop inside them. A few days after the parasite arrives, these eggs will hatch out wasps in the place of a caterpillar.
Even more bizarrely, the parasite itself isn't immune from further attack. Other wasps specialize on the larvae of the egg parasitoids, and a second wasp may well come along to parasitize the parasite. Life can be fractal.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Alex Wild is Curator of Entomology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studies the evolutionary history of ants. In 2003 he founded a photography business as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work, and his natural history photographs appear in numerous museums, books and media outlets. Follow Alex Wild on Twitter
