“Does anyone know what these brown rice-shaped casings are?” is all this reader asks in her submission regarding the ovate object pictured below. Well, to start with, we want to commend our reader on the excellent photo she has taken: it truly makes things easier when we try to identify the organisms our readers are asking about. When it comes to this particular organism, or potential “casing”, we would say this looks like a pupa. The pupal stage is the third one in an insect’s life cycle: the first being the egg stage, the second being the larval stage, and the third and final being the adult stage (when they have matured into a fully-formed insect, like a moth or a fly).