Sunday, March 18, 2012
Sunday Spinelessness - Gotcha!
I only have moment to spare today, so I thought I'd share a life and death moment from the garden.
The fearsomely-spiked creature photographed above is the larva of a ladybird (that is, a beetle of the family Coccinellidae), specifically the New Zealand and Australian native species Apolinus lividigaster. It's meal is an ahpid, though I couldn't tell you which species.
Learning that ladybirds are vicious predators (adults have more or less that same tastes as their larvae) might go some way to undermine ladybirds' status as a "cute" insect that escapes the "yuck" reaction so many of their kin seem to evoke. But it's worth remembering that ladybirds are very useful. Most species specialise in eating plant-sucking insects like aphids and scales, and so can be a boon to gardeners. On a larger scale, predatory ladybirds are often introduced as "biological" control to help keep pest numbers low.
Learning that ladybirds are vicious predators (adults have more or less that same tastes as their larvae) might go some way to undermine ladybirds' status as a "cute" insect that escapes the "yuck" reaction so many of their kin seem to evoke. But it's worth remembering that ladybirds are very useful. Most species specialise in eating plant-sucking insects like aphids and scales, and so can be a boon to gardeners. On a larger scale, predatory ladybirds are often introduced as "biological" control to help keep pest numbers low.
Labels: beetle, coccinellidae, environment and ecology, photo, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness
0 Comments:
All content not otherwise marked is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
