#perilampid

Perilampustecture.  Check out the thoracic architecture.  Download it from our sister Flickr site (https://www.flickr.com/photos/usgsbiml/?) so you can see it in vast detail...go ahead and blow up that central section and witness the balance of forms, logrhythmical changes in dished cavities, lovely layout of lines of sight, delicate deposits of texture, with scancing ridge counterprojections across the thoracic field, oiled in a brass-over-toned metallica finish.  Superb job there little 2mm hyperparasite Perilampus, raised out of a torticid caterpillar (and the likely braconid/ichneumonid inside) that was eating a sweetgum at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center by entoprotean Kristin Jayd.  

For some reason I think that Tennyson was imagining that the six hundred were riding Perilampids, I mean, wouldn't you?  This stead is Euperilampus triangularis from western Maryland. #perilampid #wasps #wasp #metallica #tennyson

A perilampid (Euperilampus triangularis).  Tiny little metallic armored knights.  Really tiny, only a couple of millimetres.  You can find them in the wilds of vegetation if you hunker down and look inside the grass and forb canopy of fields, where they sit upon leaves like little blue teardrops.  Hyperparasite of other parasitic larvae living inside a host like a caterpillar.  After hatching on the vegetation their little vaguely silverfish like larvae find a host that has been attacked by another bigger parasite burrows in and finds the other parasitic larvae and parasitises the primary parasite of the host not the host itself.  Nature can be tricky. ... and beautiful.   

sam droege, public bee servant

sam droege, public bee servant

sam droege, public bee servant