Ladybug, Ladybug
What cute things they are. About the size and color of a Red Hot candy. Black polka dots. A little hood in front. They zip about like tiny trick cars: running straight up plant stems, across the bottoms and tops of leaves, teetering at the edges, and then—flaps up—taking off like helicopters.
The ladybug looks like an insect designed by a toymaker.
Children let them run up their arms. Mothers teach the classic ladybug rhymes. (“Ladybug! Ladybug! Fly away home; Your house is on fire, your children all gone; / All but one, and her name is Ann, / And she crept under the frying pan.”) Even those who wouldn’t hesitate to swat a fly or step on an ant will escort a lost ladybug out the door.
And now, after a rain delay of several weeks, ladybugs are emerging from hibernation. As befitting ladies, it’s a quiet entrance. They crawl out from under the leaf mold, find their way to the nearest green plant, and get down to business. Their business is eating aphids, or any of the other plant lice or scale insects that suck the juice out of plants.
To the hapless aphid, of course, they’re no ladies. They’re more like the Huns, charging into aphid colonies and making off with the women and children. But so much in life depends on perspective, and from up here, the ladybug is a sweet, folkloric figure: a good luck charm whose spots can predict the years till a girl’s marriage.
In the West, ladybug prospectors hunt down their hibernation places and uncover orange clusters the size of basketballs. They fill burlap bags and sell them to insect suppliers, who in turn sell them to farmers and gardeners as an organic — and aesthetic —solution to a pest problem. Suppliers report that customers often insist on ladybugs even when cheaper, but less attractive, bugs will do a better job.
Around this time of year, some unlucky homeowners play host to hundreds or thousands of ladybugs. These are an Asian variety that often gather in the fall on the sides of buildings. As it gets colder, they slip through cracks and crevices and hibernate. In the spring, the groggy insects make a wrong turn into the house, swarm about, and usually wind up in the vacuum cleaner.
Ladybugs are not in fact bugs, but beetles – the insect order Coleoptera. There are 5,000 ladybug species worldwide, about 450 in North America. Most are red or orange with black dots, but they also come in yellow and black, and in patterns including solids and stripes. They go by such names as the twospotted lady beetle, convergent lady beetle, sevenspotted lady beetle, fifteenspotted lady beetle, and the twicestabbed lady beetle. The “lady” in the name dates to the Middle Ages, when pest-afflicted farmers prayed to “Our Lady, the Virgin,” and the helpful spotted bugs arrived.
No one knows exactly how many ladybug species are in North Jersey, not even Robert Chianese, head of the state’s Beneficial Insect Rearing Laboratory in Ewing, which is responsible for bringing many of them here.
“Right now,” he says, “we’re raising a very, very small Asian ladybug — just a little black dot — that feeds on the pests that are destroying our hemlock trees.” That pest, the notorious wooly adelgid, is an alien species that has no natural enemies here, he said.
Whatever its potential benefits to the state’s hemlock groves, however, a “little black dot” of a ladybug is unlikely to get the friendly reception accorded to the attractive, red, spotted variety. A mother seeing a small black bug crawling on her toddler is less likely to start reciting “Ladybug, Ladybug” than to give it a swat.
This is the paradox of the ladybug. The reason it leads a charmed life and doesn’t get sprayed, squashed, and lured into little canisters of poison and gooey “motel” traps is that we don’t quite see it for what it is. Beetles, to us, are usually small-scale monsters with horny snouts, menacing pincers, crunching mouth parts, and segmented abdomens. And some, like that June bug clinging to the screen door, aren’t all that small-scale. Nor does it help that there are perhaps as many as 350,000 species in the vast, thrumming Coleoptera order. Our sense of ourselves as the center of creation doesn’t jibe with the news that one out of every four animals is a beetle.
Assembled out of 100 percent genuine beetle parts, the ladybug is the most charming creature ever to don an exoskeleton. It isn’t as beautiful as the butterfly, nor as fascinating in its behavior as the ant, nor quite so comical as the inch-worm. It’s just flat-out cute. Its design is so inherently appealing that it’s been replicated in countless toys, and — whether originally by design or coincidence — in the famed Volkswagen Beetle. The Beetle car, brought back in recent years, was so lovable that it inspired an automotive cult in the Sixties and Seventies that saw cars sporting toy-like wind-up keys and polka-dot paint jobs. Disney, ultimate purveyor of the cute aesthetic, took it a step further in its “Lovebug” movies, which starred a 1963 VW Beetle named Herbie.
The ladybug owes its appeal to three design features. First, the bright colors. This, ironically, is a code in the animal world for something poisonous, or at least bad tasting. (The ladybug isn’t poisonous but will, when frightened, secrete a malodorous fluid from its leg joints.)
Second, the shape. Unlike the flat, slithery look of most beetles, the ladybug has an appealingly roundish and domed shell like a turtle. Better yet, the shell (hard wing covers called elytra and a helmet-like extension called the pronotum) tastefully covers the beetle parts, including much of the shiny, black head with its mandibles and antennae.
Third, its style of movement. Unlike other shelled creatures, the ladybug is quick and light. It practically rolls along on hair-thin delicate legs. Compare it to the iridescent Japanese beetle, which drags itself forward with a sinister deliberateness on coarse, barbed legs.
A ladybug given the run of your hand will stay about as long as it takes to recite “Ladybug, Ladybug”; then, wing covers flip forward, and transparent wings whisk it away. When it lands, the wings sometimes hang out a bit, like an errant undergarment.
Granted, some of the ladybug’s anthropomorphic charms wear off under closer observation. To see two ladybugs mating is to be reminded that fully half of all ladybugs are gentlemen bugs. Then, there’s the messy business of the metamorphosis.
Sharing the same leaves with ladybugs are menacing insects that look like small, spiky alligators, blackish purple with golden spots. These are the larval stage of the ladybugs, sometimes called “aphis-wolves” because of their voraciousness. After fattening themselves for several weeks, they hang upside down, molt into the pupa stage, and dangle like socks on the line before emerging a week later as ladybugs.
But beauty is in the result, not the process.
People mimic in their machines and other creations the forms they admire in nature. Sometimes, there’s a curious reversal, in which the original is rediscovered and admired for the ways in which it resembles the copies. In this way, the ladybug may look cute to us because it seems mechanical, toy-like, or looks and acts like the “Lovebug.” No harm in that. So long as we remember which came first.
From the column, “A World By Design.”
2003
