Photo courtesy of toastmasterskiev at flickr.com.
Although few people are aware of it, there are more than twice as many parasitical species of organisms in nature as there are free-living species. Many biological control schemes take advantage of this fact to get rid of unwanted insect pests. The trichogramma wasp, for example, is one of most widely-used natural parasitic control vectors in agriculture (especially in Russia and the former Soviet Union), and is fairly easy to acquire through mail order.
The trichogramma (the common as well as the scientific name for this group of 230+ species of wasps) are among the smallest insects known, rarely exceeding one millimeter in length. They lay their eggs in the eggs of more than 200 species of insect pests — mostly species such as corn borers, codling moths, cotton boll worms, and more than 25 other pests that affect sugarcane, cotton, corn, rice, fruit, and pine and spruce trees. The larval wasps slowly eat the insect larvae before they develop fully, but adult trichogrammas, like many parasitic wasps, are completely benign and subsist on a diet of nectar and pollen. They rarely survive more than a few days in any case, spending most of their adult lives mating and laying eggs.
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