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Green Beetle Hanger

Published May 31, 2022 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
It’s Asian Lady Beetles (Harmonia axyridis) season. If you look closely, you’ll see many of them with tiny pale greenish hair-like structures sprouting off them.
(Here the female is snacking on an aphid.)
Here’s another mating pair. As I mentioned on Sunday, this invasive lady bug is intimately associated with a parasitic fungus called Green Beetle Hanger (Complex Hesperomyces virescens). This fungus is (are) of the Laboulbeniales, an order which has at least 2,200 species in 142 genera. They’re all fungal parasites of arthropods. The hair-like thali of the fungus fire spores off towards a new host, often during copulation.
Info courtesy of this intriguing book.
Possibly the eggs of the Asian Lady Beetle (which needs another common name)..
Mugwort is great places to see ALBs. So from a distance, I presumed this was yet another, since they can sometimes be spotless. But look at that pronotum pattern: this is actually a Polished Lady Beetle (Cycloneda munda).

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This work by Matthew Wills is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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