Encrytidae, meconial deposits of Copidosoma adults - Copidosoma Ames - Tullamore, Story County, Iowa, USA
I finally received a wonderful and precise explanation of these splatters. Thank you James!
“The identity of the drawn-out deposits (multitudinous specks on the glass surface) you found and photographed in conjunction with your Copidosoma wasps are individual dried meconial deposits. Adults of most all holometabolous insects, and very notably endoparasitic hymenopterans, excrete copious meconial fluids very shortly after emergence from the pupal stage. These Copidosoma wasps are quite tiny, so on an absolute scale, the unit liquid volume of their meconial deposits is tiny, as well, and it dries up in very short order, leaving these characteristic specks. One might liken the shapes of the specks they make to spematozoans. The neonate wasp evacuates as it walks forward, away from its emergence site, with the initial droplet of meconium bursting out on the substrate to form the broad end of the speck, followed by a rapidly declining flow of liquid that leaves an elongating trail, diminishing in width to a fine point. Any irregularities in its contour might be due to either the gait of the insect's leg movements in walking or to the wasp actively wiggling its abdominal tip side to side to keep the flow/substrate deposition going to its conclusion. The size variability (.5 mm to 3 mm) among the specks could trace to individual variability in size or nutrition of members of the wasp brood, but most probably, it results from some individual wasps evacuating their total meconium in two separated bouts of deposition rather than one big ‘load’.” James W. Mertins, entomologist
Images of this individual: tag all Contributed by MJ Hatfield on 31 January, 2010 - 7:44pm Last updated 31 August, 2019 - 11:38am |