When I was photographing this Ladybug in my garden, I found it so strange that it stayed around even though I got extremely close to it. After I process the photo and view it on the computer I found it was sitting on a cocoon. I went back to the garden, it was still there. Curious what it was, I searched Google and found out this phenomenon of “Wasp virus turns ladybugs into zombie babysitters“. This is how Google explains it: Three weeks after a wasp lays its egg inside the hapless beetle, a wasp larva bursts from her belly and weaves itself a cocoon between her legs. The ladybug doesn’t die, but becomes paralyzed, involuntarily twitching her spotted red carapace to ward off predators until the adult wasp emerges a week later.
