Fun misadventures with the Brassicaceae

In addition to the four caterpillars mentioned previously and shown above, I also later found a brown cutworm-shaped one in a different brassicacean bag and caught two starving Bagrada hilaris females to accompany all of the caterpillars. Unfortunately, the second female ran off and died one day when I was replacing their food; the first one is still doing well today and has apparently become somewhat habituated to my presence. At least I gave the deceased one a few extra meals before it died...? Sigh.

On October 14, two parasitoid wasp larvae emerged, finished off their hosts' green corpses by eating from the outside in, and then began vigorously silking the floor.

the parasitoids appear to be conspecifics too

The next day, I was quite dismayed to find that #1 had developed brown spots. Note the tiny hemipteran near it; I strongly suspect it is an anthocorid and thus carnivorous. I threw the true bug outdoors and trashed the unfortunate larva.

#2 and freshly emerged #3 were fine. #4 emerged later in the day.

Several more days later, they continued drooling silk without pupating. I was getting slightly worried, as they had somehow drooled a whole ring around the cup edge despite being seemingly incapable of  voluntary locomotion. Fortunately, all of them finally turned into wasp pupae after I put a large quantity of paper inside to serve as silk anchor points.

Several days later after that, the brown caterpillar was motionless. I thought the decaying broccoli gases had killed it, but another wasp larva exited the corpse.

brown larva, before demise

Unfortunately, I could not rear any of the wasps correctly. The green caterpillar parasitoids failed to eclose from their pupae properly, and I fed them to vertebrates out of pity. The syrphid(?) puparium produced a correctly shaped wasp though. It died before I saw it; perhaps it was too entangled in the others’ silk?

adults (note odd abdomen)