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Meteorus and other ichneumonoid cocoons

I've just moved a bunch of wasp cocoon images, most of which had been ID'd as braconids, into a new Ichneumonoidea cocoon section. Rather than make the same comments on each image, I thought I'd summarize my thinking here.

I believe this is the only true Meteorus (Braconidae) cocoon we have in BugGuide (although the cocoon and the wasp at right, which was reared from it, are still sitting in Ichneumonoidea waiting for someone to confirm that it is a braconid):

I'm basing that on its resemblance to the Meteorus autographae cocoon shown on this page.

There are several other hanging-on-a-string wasp cocoons, all of which had been placed in Braconidae, identified as probably Meteorus because they were hanging on a string. However, I read in a book on parasitic insects that "a few Braconidae, e.g. Meteorus, and Ichneumonidae, Charops, have cocoons suspended from vegetation by long, silken cords..." I did a Google image search of Charops, and found this one. Yes, it's from Indonesia, but there are members of this genus in North America. Note how similar this one is to some of the hanging ones that had been called braconids. Like this one (granted, it's a much longer string):


And then there are some others that aren't hanging on strings, but seem to have been ID'd as braconids based on the pattern being similar to the one above, which I'm now suspecting is an ichneumonid. Such as:


And then there's this dangly one, which seems to me pretty different from both the Meteorus and the Charops images I found:


If anyone has further information that will help sort these out, please share!

You're missing a bunch of images which
we started gathering in a comment on this image

 
Thanks
That's weird, I thought I had checked them all out--but it was late, and I guess I was just focusing on the ones hanging from strings. This one

has an important lead, namely to page 23 of Wagner. Based on his images, and on the images at the links noted above, I think most of them can be confidently placed in either Braconidae or Ichneumonidae. I'll go through them all and file them accordingly.

 
Okay!
I think I've looked at them all now. I created an ichneumonid cocoon page, and changed your braconid "caterpillars and cocoons" page to "cocoons," since a lot of the photos there didn't have caterpillars anyway. I summarized my findings on guide pages, which are linked to from the ichneumonoid cocoons guide page.

 
Good idea, but....
I'd be a tad more comfortable if someone like Dr. Mike Sharkey of U of Kentucky, or one of his students (one of them contributes here already and my apologies that I don't recall his name) were to go through those cocoon images to confirm one way or the other their family identity. I think I may be guilty of having started leading all these submissions in the wrong direction since I was under the false impression that any pendulant cocoon was probably a Meteorus. Sorry!

 
Update
Dr. Sharkey gave me names of other people to try, and I have updated the ichneumonid & braconid guide pages with their comments. In summary, everything that has been previously identified on BugGuide as a likely Meteorus cocoon is actually an ichneumonid, most likely subfamily Campopleginae. The only exception is the little plain brown one shown at the top of this page.

 
Thanks
Any names of people who know better are helpful! I'll try getting in touch with Dr. Sharkey. In the meantime, everything I've done has been qualified with words like "probably" and "seems to be," so it should be clear that these aren't absolutely definite IDs. However, everything I've moved to Braconidae or Ichneumonidae has been moved there because of extreme similarity to images with confirmed IDs, and a lack of any evidence suggesting that they are not what they appear to be.

Can't help, but...
...I'm once more learning something unexpected. Could be that the various little bits of things hanging on threads in our woods *aren't* all "stuff caught in a spiderweb." Now I'll be looking at every dangling "something" to see if it's someone's cocoon.

Thanks.

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