Cutting Open Some Wasps

Well, since I took a break yesterday, I can make a complete post today. Yesterday was a routine day, but nothing really new occurred. I got to pick more larval whiteflies off of leaves. The eggs make a noticeable sound when they pop. After that and some routine culturing of plants (planting, watering, infesting), the whole lab went out to eat at Pei Wei...a very good experience!!! The high point of the day was listening to the Japanese PhD student give a talk about bacterial symbionts in bugs in of the genus Orius. Although not exactly related to wasps, these bugs carry the same symbiont, Wolbachia, as my wasps, Eretmocerus emiratus. I won't get into the technical jargon, but it was an excuse to learn about something else.

Alright, today was an excellent day that I can summarize in three parts: dissection, harvest, and infestation. So, I learned a new technique today. Well, I use the term "learn" loosely, but today, for the first time, I got to dissect a female wasp. Encarsia pergandiella, I think it was. It wasn't E. emiratus because it was a practice wasp that was supposed to be easier (Encarsia is easier to dissect, apparently). The point of the dissection is to determine whether or not the wasp had mated. Since E. emiratus won't readily mate like every other wasp (just my luck), it will occasionally be necessary to open up the abdomen of some females and remove their spermathecas in order to see if mating occurred (the spermatheca is exposed to a chemical that will cause it to glow if mating had occurred). Of course, the wasp dies in the process, but part of the experiment is determining whether or not certain wasps prefer certain other wasps' company. Secondly, I did a harvest. Harvests are a part of keeping the wasp colony alive. Basically, a cycle is required to keep the colony alive. The first part of the cycle is infestation (I'll get to that later), and the second part is harvesting. Harvesting involves removing cowpea plant leaves from one jar, and placing them in another jar, referred to as the emergence jar. The cowpea's leaves are covered in parasitized whitefly larvae (the now dead larvae contain wasp pupae) that will hatch in the emergence jar within a week and give us more wasps. Those wasps that are in the emergence jar after that week are then placed into another jar with cowpea plants that contain whitefly larvae that will get parasitized, and the cycle continues.

Anyway, this may seem a little convoluted the way I wrote it, so comment if you've got questions.