So much of what goes on in the insect world would make brilliant fodder for bad horror movies.

These incredibly tiny parasitic wasps

emerge from the mummified remains of a caterpillar.

That’s right, they all wiggle out of those little holes.  Sam Raimi’s got nothing on evolution.

Since all of the Gypsy moth caterpillars from the greenhouse experiment are now dead or pupated, I’ve been organizing things.  First I took all of the emerged moths out of the freezer and put them into little glass vials.

Obviously they’re all dead - the ones that say “dead” are the ones that didn’t make it to adulthood, but died along the way.  Now I’m working on organizing the lab’s parasitoid collection (hence the horror movie intro).  I’m taking this

and turning it into this

which entails dividing into species and then subdividing into gender, and finally subdividing once more into host groups. A large part of this work had previously been done, and then partially undone in the effort to identify species and subspecies, so it’s not as though I just have a jumble of random wasps to work with.  I’d have offed myself by now.

All of this seems particularly appropriate right now with the wasp bloom we’re experiencing in Toronto this summer.