Parasite egg?

[MILW]

Hi all, I've had a few of these very tiny eggs on stalks, appearing usually on the same leaf as a Monarch egg. Does anyone recognize this? I'm hoping its not a parasite egg!


cheers- Scott

[Pat]

I have them too, Scott. Haven't discovered what they are yet; I did try putting a couple of them in a separate container just to see what came out, but never had any luck finding out that way.
Pat

[Jim]

Those are Green Lacewing (a beneficial insect) eggs. The predacious larvae that emerge will help keep your aphid population in check, though I suppose there is also a chance that they could feed on monarch eggs or tiny larvae as well.

Care to venture any guesses as to why the eggs are always attached to a filament like that?

Go ahead and raise some of them...the larvae are pretty interesting and very similar to ladybug larvae.

- Jim

[Keith Petrosky]

Oh so thats what they were? I thought I had some mutant ladybug larvae!

[Pat]

Oh, those are aphid lion eggs? I'll have to move some of them from the milkweeds where they've been laid to the incarnatas, some of which always seem to get an aphid infestation near the blossoms.
Pat

p.s. About the thread, I had a strong suspicion one year that a small group of monarch eggs I had in a container got eaten by an aphid lion I found in there. Guess I was careless and it hitchhiked in there on one of the leaves or something, but after a couple of mornings, the eggs were nowhere to be seen and I had no cats either ... just one aphid lion.

So here's my layperson's guess on the thread, it's either to keep the voracious little devils from eating other aphid lion eggs, or to keep other egg-sucking predator species from doing it. I imagine the thread would not hold the weight of some other larvae crawling up it to get at the egg (if it got noticed at all).

[Megathymus ursus]

These are lacewing eggs, and no, they are not parasites, but the lacewing larvae may be able to eat small monarch larvae.