Of Wasps and Whiteflies: a Psychological Profile

Since my days mainly involve harvesting, infesting, isolating and planting, which I've already described, I'll go off on a tangent and relate to you all some interesting information. The entomologists among you may be familiar with this to an extent.

Alright, so wasps and whiteflies have some unique behavioral quirks that I think are interesting enough to discuss...

First of all, whiteflies. Today, as I was transferring whiteflies from one cage to another, I noticed that as they were disturbed, some of the whiteflies left the leaves on which they were resting, and spent about five minutes flying around their cages before settling down again. This may seem like obvious behavior, but a postdoc at the Hunter lab hypothesizes that there's something larger at work here. The whiteflies in question are the Rickettsia-positive (R+) ones that are supposedly more inclined to move around when their leaves are agitated than are the Rickettsia-negative (R-) ones (Rickettsia is a bacterial symbiont of whiteflies). This may be coincidental, but the theory is that the R+ whiteflies have a gene that causes them to exhibit this behavior. This sort of phenomenon has been seen in Drosophila, which is the basis for this idea. I'm personally a skeptic, because I've also seen this behavior, but it was age-related, not bacterial symbiont-related.

Alright, now onto wasps. Some wasps in the Encarsia genus (but not inaron) exhibit something that is called "hyperparasitism." Hyperparasitism is when one wasp laying an egg on another wasp larva that has already had time to grow in a host whitefly (of course, this doesn't apply exclusively to wasps and whiteflies, but other creatures are not the subject of my research). A wasp species is likely to autoparasitize, as well, if there are not enough whiteflies. Typically, male (unfertilized) eggs are the ones laid onto wasp larvae. Yes, it seems as if wasps are quite devoted to their self-destruction. Another interesting form of parasitism exhibited by my test subjects is "superparasitism." I'm sure that Encarsia does this as well, but Eretmocerus, the other genus of wasps at the lab, is a known superparasite. Superparasitism is when one wasp lays multiple eggs on (or in this case, under) its host when whitefly densities are too low. This may also happen by accident. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because if the host is being shared only by two larvae, they are likely to develop fully to the adult stage, although they will be smaller than the average.

Well, that's it. I'll hopefully post again on Friday.