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| My paintings of a Convergent Lady Bug from Arizona and a European Seven-spot |
When I show and sell my watercolors at art fairs, clients often request paintings of Ladybugs. Their depiction seems to be a popular collectors item. But when I pull out prints of my painting of the most common one in Arizona, the Convergent Lady Beetle, customers are often not quite happy with it. Of course, I always assumed it's my painting. And often, when they ask for a Ladybug painting, they expect a pretty flower with a LB on it. In fact, a friend of mine offers a sun flower con Ladybug and it's one of her best sellers. But it also shows a different Ladybug: the European Seven Spot.
So when I went back to Germany a couple of years ago, I dug out my old beetle paintings from the seventies. They are on bad paper and already disintegrating, but after some digital restoration I now have a 'real' Ladybug print to offer, the European Seven Spot,. Guess what: it sells much better than that of the local species.
So like in nature, the imported, maybe invasive species has crowded out the endemic. In fact, in nature it is the Asian Ladybug that is replacing the endemic LBs all over the world after over-eager gardeners released it to fight those terrible aphid plagues, while the Sevenspot was used the same way but remained relatively harmless.
But my article to day is not about bio control through imported species and its very real dangers. It's more about public perception of insects, biodiversity in general, education, and the role of the media.
The share of insects in global biodiversity is immense. There are more described species of insects than there are of plants, fish, herps, birds, and mammals together! And most described insects species belong to the order of Coleoptera, the beetles.
I know that nobody can be expected to study and know all 390,000 species of beetles that are described as of today. Beetles are the species richest group in the animal kingdom, and there are more known beetle species than there are (Vascular) Plants. Even most scientists are specialized on a few families of beetles or a geographic region. I personally, relying on the support of many specialist taxonomists, made the Beetles of Arizona my main subject. Over the last ten years, I have accumulated over 1800 species photos, which amounts to about 50% of the described beetle fauna of our state. (there will be a book)
Back to our eaxample, the Lady Beetles
Lady Beetles, LBugs, LBirds, or Coccinellidae, are a relatively small family as beetles go, but I have found members of 6 subfamilies in Arizona. There are
Sticholotidinae,
Scymninae,
Chilocorinae,
Coccidulinae,
Coccinellinae, Epilachninae. I am sure that you have seen many of them without realizing that they are all Ladybugs.![]() |
| Anatis lecontei (Giant Lady Beetle), Coccinella septempunctata (European Sevenspot) , Rhyzobius lophanthae, Psyllobora vigintimaculata (Twenty-Spotted Lady Beetle) all from Arizona, USA |
Because: Ladybugs can be as small as pinheads or nearly as big as a penny, they can be all dark, nearly all light-colored, shiny or fuzzy, spotted or uni-color. Species can be rather stable in their patterns as the famous Sevenspot or as variable as the Asian LB. In fact, the pattern of the pronotum (between head and wings) is usually more species-specific and stable than the more obvious hind wing pattern. With some experience you will see a common 'gestalt' in all of them, kind of half-globular, always pretty convex, with antennae ending in a axe-shaped club.
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| We may have spots, but we are no Ladybugs! |
Lady beetles are so 'well-known' that people who find a red or spotted beetle often think that it must be a 'kind of' lady beetle. But: if the antennae are long and thread-shaped for example, or the shape isn't half-globular, it's not a ladybug, no matter how many spots it sports. In the image above, 1 is a Weevil, 2 a Checkered Beetle, 3, 4, and 5 are Leaf Beetles, 6 and 7 are Pleasing Fungus Beetles, 8 is a Ground Beetle, 9 is a Darkling Beetle. All are from Arizona. Some may actually be mimics of Ladybugs who are bad tasting and smelly, others are probably are smelly or toxic themselves.
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| Convergent Lady Beetle feeding on Aphids |
Back to the headline, Biodiversity and Public Perception. Many people believe that they know lady bugs because they are familiar with the image of the cute, red, black-spotted, round beetle since childhood. A treasured, positive image. Later they may have become gardeners and learned to call Ladybugs 'goodies' and friends because they fight the dreaded foe of all roses and apple orchards, the ubiquitous aphid. Lately, the more observant part of the public also learned about Asian Multicolored Ladybugs- as a modern day plague.
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| German wind-up toy |
Lets check out those three different aspects of the public's awareness of Lady Beetles:
The positive image of the Seven Spot is culturally based in Europe where the (there endemic) beetle is treated like a lucky charm. It is part of children's books, jewelry, and many cheerful decorations. We were imprinted with its image literally in the cradle. I had a Seven Spot on wheels that I could ride on, but only as a small two year-old. I have heard the Seven Spot called THE quintessential beetle - by an American! Cultural cuteness easily sloshed across the ocean.
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| Epilachna tredecimnotata, Bean Beetle, a vegetarian |
As for the little garden helpers: Many ladybugs and their larvae indeed feed on just about everything that is smaller than they and cannot run - they are voracious predators of insect eggs, larvae and also aphids. Monarch protectors have watched with dismay that the eggs of butterflies can also be fair game. But there are other ladybug species that are highly specialized, feeding only on certain mealy bugs and other scale insects, some that like protein from pollen as much as that from animal sources, and a few that have just given up hunting all together and rather feed on the leaves of beans.
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Over the last decade or so, the cute image of the ladybug has been tainted. But observant readers of the news know that this invader of homes (by the thousands each winter) and biter of innocently sun-bathing humans is 'The Asian Ladybug'. Like the European Seven Spot, those beetles were brought here (and to many other parts of the worl as well) to be the gardener's best friend, and then got out of hand. The prolific species found itself in an ideal new environment removed from its original predators and disease-organisms, as it happens so often with biological control introductions. So they began to multiply. Besides media reports of their plague - or rather nuisance - effect on humans, I have not seen many research data as to how their voracious feeding (and the competition for endemic LB species) impacts other species of insects. It can't be good. Arizona so far has few data of Asian LB collections. I've found them around Prescott and Sedona. Like many tourists, they seem to like the climate there but seem to stay away from real desert areas.
For the purpose of this blog, the ladybug was just an example how our image of insects develops over our life-time. The childhood imprinting is rarely as positive as it usually is for lady beetles. While children tend to be open minded and curious, most bugs are perceived as gross or dangerous by their parents. People who are not professionally (or by vocation) learning about insects seem to get little further information in schools. So in the end, it's the media that form the perception of insects in adult Americans. The media, however, lacking educated or interested science reporters (with few exceptions), feed on each other and repeat regurgitated cud over and over again. Insect are talked about only if they are economically important, iconic, charismatic, or sensational, like super-painful stingers, dangerous 'invenomators', or impressive mass-migrators. Even the great destroyers of harvests or buildings have lost the interest of the general public in our age of pesticides.
But a little learning is a dangerous thing:
Even the well-meaning media concentrate over and over again on a few charismatics like Monarchs, Honey Bees, Tarantula Hawks - but there is nearly no awareness of the multitude of insect species that is out there. Even less understanding that this multitude is a great, valuable and an indispensable treasure.
The extremely narrow supply of information very often leads to frustrating misunderstandings: For example, well-meaning nature lovers care deeply about the perceived threat to 'our' Honey Bees, which are actually doing quite well in Arizona as feral invasives. Milkweeds are planted exclusively for Monarchs, great disappointment greets milkweed bugs and tiger moth caterpillars that instead devour the plants. Surprisingly many people know 'all' about Imported Fire Ants, Brown Recluse Spiders, and Marmorated Stinkbugs, none of which occur in Arizona.
In fact, we have hundreds of related species of ants, spiders, stinkbugs, and over 1100 endemic bee species, all interesting and important in their own right. Arizona is part of one of the biodiversity hot-spots of the world. But media reporting and thus public perception is reduced to just a few sensational species. As for the importance of diversity of insects - it seems to be a concept that is very difficult to communicate.
Biosphere scientists created their habitats at first without any conscious inclusion of insects, only to find a very imbalanced system. Asking U of A entomologist Carl Olson for advise but completely misunderstanding him they then introduced just one group (I'm not sure how many species) - grasshoppers. Now grasshoppers may be voracious herbivores, but a well rounded biotope they do not make.
A reporter called me and said she heard that I was working on something about Arizona insects. Would I give her a story? I asked what kind of story - she said 'something like finding the beetle of your dreams, the most fascinating, rare, interesting, a new species!' I said: I'm trying to show the immense diversity of insects here in the southwest. She tried one more time for a story with human interest angle? In the end there was no story. Great diversity in itself was just not interesting enough.
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Let me demonstrate my point with our example, the lady beetle. Two species are dominating public perception, the European Seven Spot and the Asian Lady Bug, when in fact we have scores of species here. Of our 6 subfamilies of Ladybugs, I am only showing one, the Coccinellinae, and of those only species that I personally found and photographed in Arizona. So the list is by no means complete. But you can see the diversity that gets neglected when we do not know of, or do not care about, all those species out there that the media never mention.
I know that the numbers of insect species are overwhelming. In a movie about birding in Central Park an educated birder says that he cares about bird species (he himself had an impressive life-list) but not about beetle species because 'there are just too many' of the latter to know them all. And then there is the fact that many (most) have only scientific names. This of course is a two edged sword: if there was more interest, there would be more common names. In Germany, where interest in insects is increasing, common names are being coined and listed as official names together with the scientific ones - some terribly clumsy and even funny, but at least it's a try to make insects more accessible . Compared to the US, and even compared to just Arizona, the list of German species is of course comparatively short.
It is no surprise that recent warnings about a catastrophic decline in the number of insect species came from Germany, and the data came from lay-entomologists. Densely populated, highly industrialized, and paying attention to insect diversity - Germany would be the country where the signs are seen first. You have to know what's there before you will notice that you are losing it. But that does not mean that the situation in the rest of the industrialized world is any better.
To me, the natural world is a fine tuned machine that needs all its kegs. So the loss of any part may jeopardize the whole. Eliminate insects, and the bottom falls out, and this goes way beyond the popularly appreciated role of pollinators. Insects are at the bottom of many food chains, linking the producers of all organic matters, the green plants, to the rest of the system. On the other side, they are irreplaceable as deconstructors of organic matter. Besides that, every species is a treasure that our children deserve to find alive and well. But even if you would take a much more anthropocentric view - Insects are potent chemical factories that still hold many undiscovered components - each species may hold its own secrets that one day we may want to decode ...
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