Talk:Parasitoid

up to five levels of parasitism are possible
explain or delete.


 * That's quite an assertive way to write, and we have a tradition of signing talk page statements using ~ too, please. unsigned comment added on 23:07, 14 April 2020‎ by IP user 178.142.222.229


 * The sentence that came from is in the lead, which summarizes fully-cited text in the article body below. The sentence runs in full "Hosts include other parasitoids, resulting in hyperparasitism; in the case of oak galls, up to five levels of parasitism are possible." The "up to five levels" refers to the hyperparasitism there: the first level is that the host is, as the sentence says, having another parasitoid as a host, and that hyperparasitoid can itself be parasitised, and so on. Again, this is explained in full detail in the body of the article. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:42, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Merian, Darwin
Darwin was certainly influenced by what he saw of parasitoid wasps, but this primarily affected his religious thinking, apparently contributing to his becoming an atheist. We may suppose this a step towards his theory of evolution, but that's speculation; so we can't put it in a history of study section really. Merian would actually fit slightly better in such a section, but she is not remembered for any attempt at classification, but primarily for her many fine natural history paintings, beautiful as well as informative. Let's stay with the usual practice of having a 'humans' section at the end of the article; what the subsections there should be called isn't terribly important, so 'Merian' and 'Darwin' will do as well as anything if no obvious grouping for them can be identified - they're certainly humans, so off to the side of the parasitoids themselves, the subject of the article. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:44, 3 September 2021 (UTC)