There are lot of things in our world is so intriguing. I came across something really fascinating the other day about parasitic wasp and ladybug.

A wasp lays an egg, and it injects it into the ladybug’s abdomen, and then the egg hatches and it grows inside the ladybug by feeding on the host’s tissues. The larval wasp knows not to eat the vital organs of the ladybug, because it would kill the host and it would die too. When it is ready to come out, the wasp larva pushes its way out of the abdomen of that ladybug, and then spins its cocoon between the ladybug’s legs. The cocoon at this stage is very vulnerable, and easily be eaten by any predator that walks by. No worries, everything is under control, because the secretions left by the larva when it breaks out could force the ladybug to stand guard over it. The amazing thing is this ladybug would sit there twitching for days to protect the cocoon. If this ladybug can survive the seven days that takes the larva to grow into an adult. It can actually recover and wear off the manipulation scheme from the larval secretions, and regrow its internal organs and reproduce.

Dinocampus Coccinellae, is the parasitic wasp that responsible for all of this manifestation. Do you know that this species is parthenogenetic, which means it does not need to fertilize its eggs to reproduce, and it can clone itself. The interesting thing is that nearly the entire Dinocampus Coccinellae species are female offspring of unfertilized eggs, although there are four or five males have been identified.

You can always read more about Dinocampus Coccinellae from Wikipedia or National Geographic.