4. Ladybugs

This post began life as "82 of 100" back in December, but never progressed past a few photos I culled from the web and so never got published. Which means two things: there is no "82 of 100" in my previous postings; and it's finally time to share these beautiful creatures, variously known as ladybugs, ladybirds, and lady beetles. 

Strictly speaking, these are not bugs, because they lack sucking, beak-like mouthparts and because they have a larval stage on their road from egg to nymph to adult. As so often with common names, "ladybug" is a misnomer. "Lady beetles," however, is quite appropriate, as evidenced by their hard wing coverings. Scientifically, they are in the Coccinellidae family of the beetle (Coleoptera) family (the name Coccinellidae coming from the Latin word coccineus, meaning scarlet; Coleoptera from the Greek koleos + ptera, meaning sheathed wings).

But why "lady" birds, bugs, beetles? Turns out, they are named for the Virgin Mary—perhaps because farmers in times past prayed to Mary to protect their crops from voracious insects, and in return she sent these little beetles dressed in her signature red cloak. Because of course, ladybugs eat not plants, but insects (think, voracious aphids): they are natural pest controls par excellence. (They do also eat pollen.) The pattern on the most common European species, Coccinella septempunctata, or seven-spot ladybird, is said to depict Mary's seven joys and seven sorrows.

It's not just in English that ladybugs are linked to the divine. In Germany, for example, they are called Marienkäfer (Mary beetle); in France, la bête à bon Dieu (God's animal), in addition to their simpler name of coccinelle; and in Russia, божья коровка (bozh'ya korovka), or "God's little cow," a reference to the beetle's spots (and indeed, an early term in English was ladycow). The earliest English appearance of "ladybird" was in 1674 in a southern English dictionary. 

As I mentioned, the life cycle is four-part: eggs, laid in rows on the underside of leaves, hatch after 3–10 days into larvae, which in turn transform into pupae after about a month; some two weeks later, the pupae metamorphose into the adults we know, which live up to a year. Both the larvae and the adults are what home gardeners covet to keep such garden pests as aphids, mealybugs, scales, and mites under control. The larvae can eat up to 400 of these soft-bodied creatures a day.

In the United States alone there are some 500 species of ladybugs, and an astonishing 4,500–6,000 worldwide, in 360 genera. Their coloring, known as "aposematic," is a warning to potential predators that they taste bad, though they do fall prey to some creatures, such as assassin bugs and stink bugs, dragonflies, spiders, tree frogs, and such birds as swallows and crows.

Here is a video that depicts how they fold up their flying apparatus into "tidy origami packages" (which you can read more about here):

And finally, because who can resist an electron microscope close-up of pretty much anything, here is an adorable ladybug face.