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I've been trying to find out the process of asilid larva making the pupal case. Does anyone have a good description of this? I've written a children's book about an asilid, but would like to have a bit of it covering this process (it's a silly story, but there are some informative things in it).

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That is a very specific question about which is probably little known......for asilids are not very well studied yet in this respect.....it is known that most larvae develop over several years and have several instars before pupation......i guess the process will be similar to most other diptera...... species of the subfamily Laphriinae that develop in wood are reasonably well described.....a very nice source for knowledge is Melin 1923.....but there are a lot of smaller papers on rearing asilids....

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I was worried that might be the case... Thank you for helping, I will look in to Melin's stuff and poke around the other literature. The story is for young readers and is a bit whimsical, but I wanted to include some informative stuff, too. Perhaps later down the road I can have some more detailed stuff.