Aug 7, 2025
Trogus vulpinus, an ichneumonid wasp that parasitizes swallowtail butterflies
August 4, 2025
Southeastern Pennsylvania
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Trogus vulpinus, an ichneumonid wasp that parasitizes swallowtail butterflies
August 4, 2025
Southeastern Pennsylvania
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Parasites week 4: parasitoids
long-tailed giant ichneumonid (megarhyssa macrurus)
Small Ichneumon
A small ichneumon wasp sitting on the edge of a sunlit leaf.
© LIA 2024
Ophion sp. (Ichneumonidae: Ophioninae)
I've been slowly improving my wasp identification skills through the online WaspID Course and I fell in love with a photo of the face of an Ophion wasp (a genus of parasitic wasps). The family can be found worldwide and is most diverse in the tropics. The genus Ophion can also be found worldwide but is most diverse in temperate regions.
Wasps have three simple light-detecting eyes on top of their head, between their compound eyes, but in most of Ophion's family, Ophioninae, these are hugeeeee. This allows them to hunt at night and they will often be attracted to lights, which their main hosts, moths, also are. These wasps are parasitoids, meaning they must live off a host to develop into an adult. A mother will lay her eggs in caterpillars feeding on exposed plants where they will hatch and feed on the caterpillar's body from the inside, leaving them alive just long enough to pupate into an adult.
The name Ophion comes from the Greek word Ὀφίων which refers to the first Titan king of heaven in Greek mythology. I do not know what the story behind that choice of name is - maybe because they're generally pretty big?
@karltface submitted: So I'm in the garage, and this thing flits onto my phone and proceeds to stumble about a bit, then cleans itself for a solid minute. Satisfied that it's not equipped with a stinger, I had a fun moment when I held out my hand and said "well, come on then". And it hopped right on! Stayed put for a lot of photos while I took it outside, but it perked right up when I presented it with a leaf. Still have no clear idea what it is, though. Some sort of ant or young wasp? Ichneumon?
Southern WI. Her name is Moon Unit.
Moon Unit is literally perfect. She’s definitely an ichneumonid wasp, but she’s a full adult. Immature wasps look like grubs generally. I can’t tell you which species exactly since there are so many that look similar!
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Parasitic Wasp. But which one? I suspect this is an ichneumonid. But which one? We know little about the identity of this group despite the fact that there are over 700 species of ichneumonids known from the tiny tiny state of Maryland. This particular specimen came from one of the MAGLEV train yard proposed sites on the Beltsville Agriculture Research Center. As a group these non-stinging wasps lay their eggs in or on other insects...almost always their larvae. As is the case with almost all insects. They are picky about their food/hosts and craft clever strategies to find and deposit their baby aliens in that group. The host group, of course, is not into this and develops countermeasures and they both go down paths of more and more nuanced life together, by no measure a marriage, but more of a insecticidal détente where a certain proportion of the host's babies are given up to the wasp, and the wasp doesn't parasitize all the host babies....because if they did its end of the line for them being so specialized and their lives so intertwined such so (note: never use of the word "so" this much) that the wasp must, in a way, support the life of its host all the while letting its children eat some of them alive. There is a lesson here for us humans...but it escapes me what that lesson is (other than not useing "so" so often). Photo by Anders Croft.
Ichneumon Wasp
An ichneumon wasp on a buddleja leaf, in the garden.
Ichneumon wasp on a plastic trash can in my yard
May 18, 2018
Southeastern Pennsylvania
From Bugguide.net: Ichneumonids are notoriously hard to identify: aside from the sheer number of species, there are numerous cases of distant relatives that appear almost identical. Any identification based solely on comparing images should be treated as suspect unless an expert has said there are no lookalikes for the species or group in question.