Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home

I was drinking Sencha at my favorite teashop, watching a ladybug crawl along the windowsill instead of doing my work. I, like many people I think, have affection for ladybugs or ladybirds, which don’t seem like “bugs” at all in the sense of causing fear or feelings of squeamishness, although there is a phobia regarding them named coccinellidaephobia.

While eyeing this beetle (in the order of Coleoptera), a man with a child in his arms walked up, and I thought I overheard him say, “There, you can tell it’s a boy ladybug, because it’s orange.” I had never heard such a thing (It could have been completely true, as far as I knew). Whether you think it’s unmannerly to eavesdrop or not, I couldn’t help but hear, so I asked him to elaborate. He explained that what he really said was that the orange ladybugs are from Asia, and the red ones are from North America. He further told me that the orange are cheap imports taking over the native species. I just thought the orange ones were an anemic-looking variant.

Agreement among websites seems universal that the orange ones hail from Asia and the red ones from North America. The orange ones are about one-third longer than natives, and have nineteen, yes, exactly nineteen, spots on their backs. Counting the spots is one way of identifying which ladybug you’re looking at. The Department of Agriculture helped introduce exotics, as non-native species are called, in an attempt to control aphids. They eat fifty aphids a day.

Over four hundred species of ladybug exist in North America. Can everyone coexist, or are the Asian ladybugs outcompeting the natives, as the man at tea told me? A Canadian website, The Local Gardener, claims that  they are, to the extent that they are becoming pests. They even bite humans—maybe a ladybug phobia isn’t so farfetched. This informative and readable site includes a ton of (well, ten) interesting facts about ladybugs, including the statement that they bleed reflexively to repel predators.

The Lost Ladybug Project points out that non-native beetles have increased at the same time that natives have decreased, but doesn’t hypothesize a reason. The project collaborates with Cornell University and seems like yet another worthwhile and reputable citizen scientist endeavor in which to participate. If you take better photos than I do, you may find yourself a valuable addition to the project and even become, in their punny (that really is a word!) parlance, a “superspotter.”