from its cocoon some time between August and October. The male does not feed after emerging, and lives for only a few days. It has wings almost clear of scales and flies strongly, seeking out a mature female to inseminate. The female in contrast, remains in her bag after emerging from the pupa. She is a highly specialised, worm-like creature: she has no wings at all, and lacks legs and even eyes; she lies helpless in her shelter, only able to turn her posterior towards the opening of her bag for insemination, and away from the opening for oviposition. The male inserts the point of his abdomen through the neck of the bag and inseminates her. Oviposition starts immediately afterwards, sometimes even before insemination, and in mid- or late winter successful females produces on average about 1600 eggs. They remain in the bag together with the shrunken remains of the mother, hatching about two months later. This relatively large clutch size reflects the fact that on average only a few of the larvae survive to reproduce. The large number of eggs is at least in part an adaptation to the female's inability to fly and the compensatory strategy for dispersion of the newly hatched larvae; wattle bagworm larvae rely on an unusual mode of transport. After hatching as a caterpillar, the insect spins a silk thread and hangs from the end for a few days. The wind or a passing bird sometimes transports the caterpillar to another tree, spreading the species quite effectively, if inefficiently. Given the large number of eggs, there is a reasonable chance that at least some of them will find adventitious transport. The rest either starve, or settle down in the tree where they hatched which is likely to die from defoliation within a few seasons if natural or artificial controls do not prevent it. The wattle bagworm has many natural enemies. They include parasitic wasps, flies and beetles, and various predators, such as spiders and birds, not to mention fungal diseases such as Entomophthora and Isaria species, bacterial diseases such as Bacillus thuringiensis, and polyhedral virus diseases. Attempts to use such a virus for bagworm control during the 1950s gave results too inconsistent to be satisfactory at the time. In the wild probably the most important insect enemy of Kotochalia junodi is an interesting parasitoid wasp, a member of the Ichneumonidae, Sericopimpla sericata. In colour