Spotted on Governor’s

You can put a lady bug/lady beetle in the freezer for a couple of minutes (no more than 6) to slow it down for photography, but when you’re in the field that’s not much of an option. Especially since I’m not collecting.

I found this one on Governor’s Island on Sunday. It was in the grass of the moat of Fort Jay. I let it crawl up on my finger and palm and snapped this image before it flew off. After checking some images, I thought it might be the elusive Nine-spotted lady, once abundant but now very rare on the East coast. This was an exciting thought, and I sent this image to the Lost Ladybug Project at Cornell. But on further examination, what I took for the forth spots on each elytra aren’t. (I await my correction from the LLP.) I guess that those bumps might be bits of wing, which is also what you can see at the rear.

So that would make this the Nine-spotted’s relative, the Seven-spotted, Coccinella septempuntata, an invasive introduced from Europe in 1956. A lesson in observation: it is better to look rather than photograph.