The Mass Dying, and the New Dawn. Renewed Hope for Wasps?

Bad news, than good news. That's the theme of the day...

So, first of all, I had to check on the cowpea plants that were left in incubation overnight. During incubation in a 30-degree (Celsius) room infested with whiteflies, the plants become covered with the insects, which lay eggs onto them. Unfortunately, the whiteflies did not do so, and we had to leave the plants in there for another day. Perhaps tomorrow they will be ready.

Alright, on to the wasp stuff. So, on Friday, we harvested a bunch of E. emiratus wasps that were all Rickettsia-negative and either Wolbachia-positive or Wolbachia-negative. They were accidentally stored in a container that was not humid enough, which caused a quarter of the wasps to die. Another quarter or so was drowned in the honey contained in their individual vials, and a small percentage died during pupation. After all of this, we were left with only 17 W- females (the sample was already male-biased in the first place, and about 10 females drowned in honey), so we could only do 17 matings.

Now for the good news. Although we were only able to do 17 matings, most of the matings were successful. We did two types of matings: W- females with W- males (the control), and W- females with W+ males. The goal was to determine whether W- females were reluctant to mate with W+ males, because doing so would limit the amount of viable eggs that the female could produce (this is due to cytoplasmic incompatibility, or CI, which describes the "sabotaged" mating that occurs between two wasps of different infection statuses). If you'll recall a previous post, we determined that when placed on leaf discs, which simulate a natural environment, the wasps are more likely to mate. Indeed, this was proven to be the case, but we did encounter an important problem. Since the leaf discs contain whitefly larvae, the females--mated or not--will oviposit, and be unable to mate. This was an issue with some of the pairs, but for most, matings occurred within minutes, or even seconds, of arrival onto the leaf disc. Some wasps even mated in their vials. We were worried that the weather might make the wasps less inclined to wait, but they didn't seem to mind. I also got to stand on a table today!