Man those saddleback caterpillers are beautiful! (And so are the flowers of course.) I've never seen one of those caterpillers except in field guides. By the way, your photos actually came up as html documents instead of photos, so the loaded in IE instead of in my default photo viewer. I don't know why that is. Thanks. As you can probably tell, I'm way behind in reading my email again. Barry
--- On Sat, 8/22/09, doug bidlack <[email protected]> wrote: From: doug bidlack <[email protected]> Subject: [ENTS] Re: Insect Sting To: [email protected] Date: Saturday, August 22, 2009, 8:03 PM Ed, I enjoyed the article. I remember hearing about this guy Schmidt while I was at Clemson. I was told that cicada killers and cow killers (a large species of velvet ant which is actually a wasp) were really quite painful and I always wondered who this guy was. My great appreciation for all sorts of wasps started while I was at Tennessee. I studied host plant resistance and parasitoids in tobacco. The main pests that I studied were tobacco budworm and corn earworm. I was absolutely amazed at how few of these caterpillars ever became adults. Early in the year more than 90% were taken out by an ichneumonid parasitoid and a little later in the year most were hammered by a braconid parasitoid (both of these are small wasps). By the end of the year most were being killed by a couple of parasitic flies. This doesn't even include those that would have been lost to predation by various larger wasps if I wouldn't have removed them from the field into small cups filled with food. I once watched a very large tobacco hornworm get torn to pieces by an amazingly large and beautiful paper wasp. The hornworm thrashed about like crazy whenever the wasp came near but it would skillfully fly up behind the beast and bite right behind the head area. After a few of these bites the hornworm was basically defenseless and the wasp carved up large pieces and flew off. Every bit as intense as a lion taking down a zebra. Nowadays I prize the nests of all manner of wasps because of my garden. I have a nice bald-faced hornet nest on one corner of the house and a whole bunch of paper wasp nests all over the place. They terrorize the local caterpillar population. I also plant lots of herbs and flowers to bring in parasitic wasps, flies and all kinds of other predatory insects. They really love stuff like goatsbeard, summersweet (sweet pepperbush) and bottlebrush buckeyes. Today I got stung by a really cool insect. When I went to cut some of the gladiolas to bring in to the house I thought I was pricked by one of the sharp leaf tips. It hurt more than just a prick though and I looked down to see a saddleback caterpillar. I had never seen one in the wild before and I had no idea that they occurred this far north. When I looked them up in a book I read that they can be found from Florida to Massachusetts to Missouri to Texas. I would rate the sting about the same as a paper wasp. Not too bad. I was surprised to see that Schmidt ranked paper wasps ahead of yellowjackets and honeybees. He must mean a different species than the common ones here in the east...maybe like the giant one I saw in Tennessee. There are over 20 species of paper wasps in North America. I attached some photos of the cool saddlebacks plus a picture of the flowers that were well worth the little sting. Doug --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Eastern Native Tree Society http://www.nativetreesociety.org Send email to [email protected] Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/entstrees?hl=en To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
