Life, for our garden insects, can be summed up as ‘eat or be eaten’. And even when you've avoided being eaten from the outside-in, there's always the possibility that you could be eaten from the inside-out…
Many gardeners will be familiar with parasitic wasps from their use as a biological control in greenhouses, such as Encarsia formosa, which attacks whitefly scales. However, the UK is home to around 2800 species of parasitic wasp, many of which are specialists, feeding on one or two species. Beetles, bees, ladybirds, flies, spiders – all face predation by parasitic wasps, though many wasps favour the caterpillars of butterfly and moth species. This includes two particularly notorious pest species – the large and small white butterflies, or cabbage whites.
Cotesia glomerata is an endoparasite of…
