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Photo#559192
Charops annulipes - female

Charops annulipes - Female
Ledges State Park, Boone County, Iowa, USA
July 31, 2011
Size: Maybe around 5 mm?
gathering_2011
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Charops annulipes - female Charops annulipes - female Charops annulipes - female Charops annulipes - female

Thanks for the photo
of the wasp and the emergent hole. I found a cocoon and was wondering whether the emergent hole was the work of the cocoon maker or a parasitoid and now I can tell.

Question: by the dates of the photos it looks like the wasp emerged the same day you collected the cocoon, correct? I ask because I would love to find one of these before the wasp has emerged.

 
Yes
I found it, took it back to the hotel, and found the adult had emerged.

 
What are the chances??
You couldn't plan that.
I have discovered that collecting at the right time in the life cycle increases the odds of a successful adult emergence. Unfortunately, it's kind of hit and miss as to what and when we find to collect.

Exit hole?
I guess that that is the exit hole. Nice finding. A minor detail: since the cocoon usually hangs from the thread, I would suggest rotating the image 180 degrees. It would be more natural. No big deal.
Wouldn't it be nice to catch one emerging?
Bob: there are several cocoons in the guide, in Campopleginae, that look almost exactly alike. Would they belong to the same genus or species?

 
I had tried rotating
the image, but the shadows are all wrong and it made the image look bad. Rotated 90 is not too bad, but the shadows still look a little off. I think this way also makes the hole the focus of the image, but I can rotate it if you want.

 
Lookalikes
The thought that there were pics here of thread-suspended cocoons unassociated with adults that might be this species had occurred to me, but I hadn't persuaded myself to look for them (too preoccupied with reading about the human brain to have looked). We have only one species of Charops, but we definitely have more than one campoplegine species with a thread-suspended cocoon, as this one is defintely not Charops:

Not sure whether I would be able to determine the identity of the latter from the Smithsonian Collection, but I will hope to try. I would presume that thread-suspension evolved as a means of deterrence of some kinds of hyperparasitoids that attack cocoons (e.g. Gelis and some kinds of chalcidoids).

Moved

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