low daily output with a range in production of 4–1000 million female parasitoids per week, to meet demand for suitable parasitoids for different crops. In culture Parasitoid wasps influenced the thinking of Charles Darwin. In an 1860 letter to the American naturalist Asa Gray, Darwin 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 palaeontologist Donald Prothero notes that religiously-minded people of the Victorian era, including Darwin, were horrified by this instance of evident cruelty in nature, particularly noticeable in the Ichneumonidae. Notes References Parasitic insects Articles containing video clips Parasitism