We have a mystery at our house!
After our caterpillars make their chrysalis, it appears that something gets inside the chrysalis and eats the forming butterfly. We don’t know what it is, or how it got there.
When I bring the caterpillars their food, I shake the leaves very very good and I check them for bugs or eggs. We rarely notice any bugs other than the caterpillars in the aquarium and we get rid of them as we see them.
Four days ago I found a mystery bug in our aquarium. I thought it just got in somehow. Then I found another one. Today we found another one! We were looking, and Momma found a chrysalis that was see through and we looked at it and discovered a hole in it! We think the mystery bug came out of that hole.
Do you know what type of bug this is? We want to learn how to keep them away from our butterfly chrysalis’s. We are hoping that these are the only ones and that we get some butterflies soon.
Unfortunately, it looks like some of the caterpillars you caught were parasitized by the Trogus Pennator Ichneumon Wasp. What they do is lay their eggs inside the living caterpillar and then the wasp larva feeds off the inside of the caterpillar without killing it, until it is in the pupae stage. It is very common in Swallowtail butterflies. Here is a link for more information on the parasitic wasp. http://bugguide.net/node/view/359677
I would think the only way to make sure you don’t have the wasps living inside the caterpillar is to find and collect the butterfly eggs. That way you would beat the wasps.
Sorry, this is not the best news, but it is another glimpse of how amazing God’s creation is and how interconnected everything truly is. And, think, now you got to learn about, not one, but two insects’s life cycles!
Thank you! So far we raised 5 Wasps and one butterfly. Hoping for more butterflies!