Ladybirds

A crude montage of ladybirds photographed in 2011.

On the principle that I should photogaph anything that looked like an interesting invertebrate or plant, I ended up with shots of many different creatures last year. Only one of these photos was taken when we were actually looking for ladybirds. The others were on general walks, or just when I was looking around.  I have posted a few of these before, but not all of them.

Many of them are named for the number of spots they show, and it doesn't help that some of these have variable numbers of spots. But most in this montage are pretty typical of their species. The Harlequin is a special case; it has three basic colour forms in this country, and this mating pair shows two of them. So those two are Harmonia axyridis forma conspicua (black with two red spots) and succinea (orange-red with black spots).

The scientific names also get complicated when describing the number of spots. Although sometimes you see their scientific names with the numeric characters, that is not strictly correct; and, for example, the 24-Spot Ladybird should really be called Subcoccinella vigintiquattuorpunctata, not 24-punctata.

This isn't close to being all the British species, but even so, I was pleased to find I had as many as this.