When Charles Darwin first encountered parasitoid wasps, he was horrified. In an 1860 letter to American botanist Asa Gray, he wrote: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”
The wasps that Darwin encountered were ichneumon wasps, now also known as Darwin wasps, and it is believed that they greatly influenced the way Darwin thought about nature.
