New NIOO publication: #Temperature affects the outcome of #competition between two sympatric #endoparasitoids. #densityeffect #speciesinteraction #temperatureextreme
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2023.06.003

If there's one kind of animal that fascinates me, that'd be parasitoid wasps. How did they become endoparasitoids? There are as many extant intermediate steps, so to speak, as imaginable, and treatises that describe them. But then there's also the fossil record:

"Parasitoid biology preserved in mineralized fossils", by van den Kamp et al. 2018 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05654-y

"About 50% of all animal species are considered parasites. The linkage of species diversity to a parasitic lifestyle is especially evident in the insect order Hymenoptera... using high-throughput synchrotron X-ray microtomography, we examine 1510 phosphatized fly pupae from the Paleogene of France and identify 55 parasitation events by four wasp species"

#Hymenoptera #endoparasitoids #wasps #fossil