Last summer while hiking near Bald Hill we found a rose bush covered in strange mossy growths. I didn’t take a picture, but they looked like this:
Rose gall (photo from Wanderin' Weeta blog)
After some research, we learned that they were “mossy rose galls”, inhabited by the larvae of the Diplolepis rosae wasp:
Rose gall wasp, credit to hedgerowmobile.com
John put the galls in a jar, and we forgot about them for four months. When John opened the jar today, imagine our surprise to find these beautiful creatures:
Female (top) and two males, taken with 20x magnification through John's dissecting scope.
Female close-up.
These are Jewel Wasps, Torymus bedeguaris, which parasitize the gall wasp larvae – meta-parasites! No gall wasps hatched out, either because they were all parasitized or (more likely) because they were more sensitive to dessication as the galls dried out.
Beautiful wasps!
And thank you for notifying me and including the link to my blog post.
Awesome! Its funny I know about them a little too since our Plant Ecology lab takes a close look at them! I LOVE the green metallic ones! 🙂
So beautiful! They look a lot like some of the ones I vacuumed out of my research plots. I absolutely love the parasitoids (and parasitoids of parasitoids) — they have such beautiful sculpturing, brilliant colors, and cool (reduced) wing venation. Thanks so much for sharing your hymenopteran friends! Yay!