This video from the USA is called Ladybug plays with sprinkles.
Tiny new species of beetle discovered that keeps it head inside its body
New ladybug is just 1 millimetre long
October 2012. A former Montana State University student discovered the rarest ladybug in the United States, according to MSU entomologist Michael Ivie. The new ladybug was crawling across a sand dune in southwest Montana when it dropped into a trap set by entomology grad student Ross Winton.
The ladybug was so small that Winton said he originally thought he had found the body part of an ant. Then he thought the insect was missing its head. He wasn’t even sure at first that he had found a ladybug because the insect was tan instead of red and didn’t have the spots normally associated with ladybugs.
Closer inspection proved the insect was a male Ladybird Beetle, and its head was attached after all, Winton said. It was just tucked inside a tube in its thorax, much like a turtle pulls its head back into its shell.
Since Winton didn’t recognize the ladybug, he took it to Ivie who realized he had once seen a female of that type from Idaho, about 90 miles away from Winton’s discovery. Ivie also knew that one of his Australian colleagues was revising the group, so he mailed Winton’s ladybug to Canberra.
Winton soon learned that his ladybug — now in pieces and still in Australia — belongs to a group of beetles that’s both familiar and well-known in this country. Known as Ladybird Beetles, the group contains some of the most bizarre, smallest and least recognizable ladybugs in existence, according to Hermes Escalona and Adam Slipinski who published the Systemic Entomology article.
Winton said, “This species and some of its sister species are some of the rarest mostly due to their size, collection frequency, techniques required to collect them and the fact that we know almost nothing about their biology (life cycle, where it lives, what it eats, etc).”
New species
Ivie said Winton’s discovery turned out to be the only male of a new species, otherwise known from a single female from just south of the Centennial Valley in Idaho. Since, in an interesting twist, males are required for the description of a new species of Ladybird Beetles, Ross’ specimen became the unique single specimen upon which a species is based.
“Without that male specimen, the species could not have been described. The tiny species is known from only two individuals, one male and one female, making it qualify for the rarest species in the USA,” Ivie said.
New genus of ladybird discovered in USA
“The species is very unusual not only because of its small size, unique habitat and rarity, but the fact that its head is pulled back into a tube in its thorax makes its biology quite a mystery,” Ivie said. “It was so unique that it was placed, along with another new species known from Baja California, in a new genus. While discovery of a new species of beetle in the USA is not an everyday event, a completely new genus is quite rare.”
Ivie said he requested that his colleagues name the new ladybug “wintoni” after Winton, but Escalona and Slipinski eventually named it Allenius iviei. Ivie, who was Winton’s adviser when Winton was studying for his master’s degree, proposes that the common name be “Winton’s Ladybird Beetle.” He said Winton deserved the honour and noted that the find was a “stunning example of the contributions and discoveries made by student researchers at MSU.
Size of a grain of sand – Just 1 millimetre long
“This was totally Ross’ discovery,” Ivie said. “He is the one who designed the study, placed the traps, sorted the materials and recognized that it was not sand – no small accomplishment when you consider the animal is the size and colour of a grain of sand.
“Further, he is the one who recognized it as something unusual,” Ivie said.
As so often happens in science, Winton said his discovery was “totally random.” He came across the ladybug in 2009 while researching the role of grazing and fire on the community dynamics of insects that live in the sand dunes on the north shore of Red Rocks Lake in Montana’s Centennial Valley. Winton believes the one millimetre-long ladybug normally lived in plants, but happened to fall on the sand where it was caught.
Winton earned his bachelor’s degree in wildlife management from MSU in 2005 and his master’s degree in entomology in 2010. Now a senior wildlife technician with Idaho Fish and Game, Winton said he mostly works with big game and wildlife habitat these days, but he still remembers what it took to trap the rare ladybug.
He started by diving into recycling bins around Bozeman and visiting Lehrkind’s Coca-Cola Bottling Company to collect enough two-litre plastic bottles for his study. He then cut the bottles off at the shoulder and placed the resulting funnel into the bottom piece, creating traps that would funnel insects into preservative at the bottom. Ross then hauled the traps to Beaverhead County where he buried them up to their edge in the sand dunes, creating a pitfall that trapped insects as they crawled across the sand.
The traps worked well, but animals and fire sometimes interfered, Winton said. Coyote pups would dig up the bottles and play with them like chew toys. An unexpected controlled burn to remove unwanted vegetation from the sand dunes once caused half the bottles to curl in on themselves. Fortunately, the bottles became like plastic balloons around the insects.
“It was pretty handy,” Winton said.
The bug was described in the journal Systemic Entomology.
