All those years of collecting bird poop to see what fruit birds were eating by identifying the seeds paid off (again). After I retired in 2018, I continued this research for a few years, collecting seeds from bird droppings and collecting more reference seeds.
My latest paper is a discovery I made of tiny dead wasps that had emerged from rose seeds I collected. It's in the newest issue of The Great Lakes Entomologist, and one of my photos of the wasps is on the cover:
This recently-emerged wasp is on a rose hip from Multiflora Rose; if you are familiar with the size of the hips on this introduced species you'll know they are pea-sized or smaller. The wasp is only a few millimeters long. You can see the various holes in the surface of the hip where she and her sister wasps emerged. Yes -- they are all females; I seem to have a knack for finding parthenogenetic insects when I am studying birds. These wasps develop entirely within the seed, and the paper has photos of seeds with emerging and emerged wasps.
The bird connection is that these wasps have never been confirmed as having been dispersed by wild birds in North America -- but I found them having emerged from the seeds contained in fecal samples of multiple bird species. This is important because these wasps do not fly very far on their own. Birds may be very important dispersers of these rose pests, particularly of the invasive Multiflora Rose. Given that there are other related wasp species that feed on other bird-dispersed plants, researchers should be on the lookout for additional evidence of bird dispersal of these insects.
The paper is available free online:
Confirmation of avian dispersal of a seed chalcid wasp in North America and a new host record for Megastigmus aculeatus (Hymenoptera: Megastigmidae). Great Lakes Entomologist 57:69-75.
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