2023-06-15 08:53:00
The checkerboard ladybird deserves a nature journal for its name alone. Like almost all ladybug species, the checkerboard ladybug is a notorious aphid eater. So if you want to see one, it is recommended that you have a garden with room for plants that host aphids.
Checkerboard ladybugs are not red but yellow with black dots. Now there are more ladybugs in that color, such as lemon ladybugs and some multi-colored Asian ladybugs, which can dress in many colors. Checkerboard ladybugs are the only ones that do not have round dots, but square or rectangular ones. Hence the chessboard. The black dots of one checkerboard ladybug are larger than those of the other, and sometimes such a beetle appears completely black, just as multi-colored Asian ladybugs can be almost black.
Miniature monsters from prehistoric times
The chessboard ladybug in the picture is climbing my thumb. The beetle sat on the garden table. I sometimes come across an aphid in the garden and once in a while I see a plant turning black from the aphids: a ragwort for example, or a cuckoo flower. But before the plants succumb to it, earwigs and ladybugs come into action. The larvae of ladybirds are particularly deadly to aphids; they eat up to 120 a day and don’t stop until they pupate.
That pupation can often be seen in the garden. Ladybugs don’t always drop to the ground for this, like most beetles. The larvae, which look like miniature monsters from prehistoric times, usually sit on a leaf, where they turn into a kind of blob that emerges as a ladybug following two days. They sometimes fall from a plant or tree and last year I saw a car with up to ten pupating ladybugs on it.
Three times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes regarding something that grows or blooms. Read his previous Nature Diaries here.
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