It’s been an interesting couple of days on the playground at school. The children have found larval ladybugs, which if you’ve never seen before look rather like small black and red monsters. We found them last summer, too, which is the only reason why I what they actually are. (Good thing, or I would be trying to perform some sort of playground exorcism.) That’s the larva on the right. The pupae is metamorphizing on the left.
This morning the children filled up several coffee cans with specimens and I decided we should look for some eggs. It was wicked hard for me to find them on the underside of the leaves. Jackson was the only one who could do it, when I asked him how come he was so good at it he told me, “I eat lots of carrots.” Yeah, that’ll do it.
I was so mistaken about so much. I took pictures of the eggs, and also took a stepstool out so the children could see them up close on the actual leaf. I didn’t pluck the leaf off the tree because I didn’t want to kill a whole bunch of little ladybugs. It seemed so ghastly.
My old eyes kept looking at these teeny tiny bugs and I thought, “Those can’t possibly be actual ladybugs.” I decided that they were probably baby aphids and plucked the leaf off the tree so I could put it under a microscope.
Ummmmm, I was wrong. We looked at them under the microscope, and found that they were just incredibly tiny ladybug larva.
Here’s a time lapse video about ladybird bugs growing. Warning, it’s kind of gross. But fascinating.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqddneGYkc4&sns=em
Deborah says
I never knew. Now I know.
Brad says
In the movie, I like when they first hatch. All their little legs are flailing in the air.
Curt says
That is cool. If you have an over-abundance of lady bugs, I’ll take some. Maybe they will eat the aphids/mites that are causing galls to form on my ash tree.
Gretchen says
I appreciate that you called them ladybirds. Brilliant! Last year in 1st grade the reading series my son used was British and he was a little confused when the picture showed a ladybug but the text said ladybug. He learned lots of other new vocab. I am disappointed that he never says whilst or spilt.