As part of his "know thine enemy" attitude to gardening, Dez had captured some cabbage white caterpillars and kept them in jars. Several of these have been parasitised by ichneumon wasps.
In the first instance the appearance of what he thought were eggs ("Caterpillars don't lay eggs, do they?") turned out to be ichneumon pupae. The caterpillar from which they emerged died shortly afterwards.
Yesterday he witnessed some fascinating behaviour: a caterpillar started spinning a silk platform and after it had finished, it appeared to lay the pupae as though they were eggs. That's really quite mind-blowing: not only do the ichneumons parasitise the caterpillar, while they are doing so they control its behaviour, presumably by chemical means. That seems just so much more sinister than the baby cuckoo using visual signals (huge gaping yellow beak) to control the behaviour of adult reed warblers.
