No Guts, No Glory....

I have spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks dissecting lady beetle abdomens. Why you ask would someone spend their time doing this? Worthwhile question for sure.

We are interested in determining the proportion of native and exotic lady beetles that are attacked by a parasitoid wasp, Dinocampus coccinellae. The female wasps sting the lady beetles and deposit an egg inside. the egg hatches and the wasp larva feeds on the lady beetle. If you look closely you can see the dead larva in the dissected abdomens above. I circled it in the top picture and there is a close up in the bottom picture. Eventually the wasp will emerge from the lady beetle and form a cocoon underneath the beetle. For more pictures and information about the wasps, see Chelsea's posts on March 9 and August 9 2010.

The goal of our study is to determine if either the type of crop or natural habitat within which the lady beetles are found, or the composition of the larger-scale landscape surrounding each habitat influences rates of parasitism among native and exotic lady beetle species.

The results of this study will be presented by our lab at this years Entomological Society of America meeting in December in San Diego, so we have a lot of beetles to dissect in a hurry!