In the highlands of Scotland, the forest seemed calm and peaceful. Nothing was going on. There were no people. There were just pine trees and heather. It was the perfect place to grow up for a young heather beetle larva, with so much food and so little disturbance. But the heather beetle larvae would never turn into a heather beetle. Their days were numbered. On a small, delicate leaf, the predator waited for his next fate. Music.
They are black, they are red, if you are an aphid, you are dead. Lady Birds, Lady Bugs. If you have an infestation, Lady Birds are your salvation. Lady Birds, Lady Birds, Lady Bugs, Lady Bugs. Ladybirds, ladybugs, ladybugs. Hello everyone and welcome to Hidden Wings and Bloodlust, a podcast about ladybirds and ladybugs around the world. I'm Rachel and I want to thank everyone who's been listening to the show over the last week.
I really wasn't expecting that so many people would want to hear about Ladybirds especially since I gave it a break for so long but it's been great and I've had a lot of support especially on Blue Sky which if you're not signed up to it you really should sign up it's much better than, Musk's old platform shall we say and it's really fantastic to be talking about Ladybirds again, and so if you're ready let's get started with today's ladybird.
I had a bit of a surprising time at researching this one. I really really wasn't expecting it to be so interesting. Well I mean ladybirds are always interesting but I wasn't really expecting to find such a lot of unique facts about it and hopefully you'll find it quite enlightening as well. So let's just get into it. Coccinella hieroglyphica, the hieroglyphic ladybird. So called because the markings on its elytra resemble Egyptian hieroglyphics.
So our journey starts in the highlands of Scotland, near Inverness. In 2023, I was up there with a friend, and one day we went off into a forest to go and try and find some rare ladybirds. And within about half an hour, I had spotted several hieroglyphic ladybirds within the space of two or three metres. In the UK, hieroglyphic ladybirds are rare, and they're only found in specialist habitats such as heathland or pine forests.
But that does not seem to be the case everywhere. In Pakistan, several have been found in wheat fields and they're also found in lowland moors but they can also be found in wet meadows, marshland, wasteland and forests. And in a peat bog in Belarus a couple of years ago in one study which I've linked to they were the most abundant ladybird found in that site. You can also find them in the mountains.
Although lowland heathland is their preferred habitat. They're found in the Paleoarctic region, which if you remember stretches right from the UK in the Iberian Peninsula, as far east as Pakistan and India. A subspecies has also been found in North America, called Coccinella heiroglyphica manheimi. There are at least four subspecies of the ladybird, And they include Coccinella hieroglyphica Humboldtiensis Coccinella hieroglyphica kirbyii.
Coccinella hieroglyphica hieroglyphica and coccinella hieroglyphica manheimi. So there are several forms, colour forms of the hieroglyphic ladybird. The most common form in the UK is an orange beige colour. There is a scutellary spot, which is the spot just where the elytra or wing case meets the pronotum and it's got white patches on either side. The scutellum is the area where the top of the elytra meet the pronosum, and that's why the spot is called the scutellery spot.
On each side of the scutellary spot, there are what looks like three streaked black spots joined in a line, which look like they have become smudged. Then at the rear, there is one spot on either side. However, that is not always the case. Sometimes all of the spots are merged, like the darker forms of the 10 spot, And sometimes it can resemble a 14 spot, except that it has a darker colour. And it's quite similar in size to the 14 spot. It's quite small. The pronotum and the head look
like that of a 7 spot. But the ladybird is very small compared to that. If you think of a 7 spot, it's about between 5 and 8 millimetres long. This one is about 4 millimetres long. There's also a completely melanistic form. Another one which I saw in Scotland.
The ladybird is completely black apart from a couple of white markings on its head, and other colour forms such as a picture I saw from Canada of Coccinella hieroglyphica kirbyii include a red variation where the markings have got pale rings around them the legs are black and the underside of the ladybird is black.
The larva is similar to other larvae of the coxin of the genus, but rather than having a bluish tinge like some of the others, like the seven spot, the larva is dark grey or black, with fine hairs coming out of black tubercules, which are the sort of follicles that give rise to the hairs on the larva.
But on the first and fourth segments of the abdomen, the first one being the one that meets the thorax, and the fourth one is one of the middle segments of the larva's abdomen, the outer tubercules are yellowish or whitish. On the second and third thoracic segments, there are pale yellow patches. So the pattern of the larva ends up looking like it has a bit of a yellow cross-shaped pattern on its back.
The pupa is orange with dark spots and has got slightly sharp edges down the sides, giving it a slightly sculptured appearance according to the field guide for the ladybirds of britain and ireland and long-time listeners will no doubt be absolutely stunned to hear the earth-shattering revelation about the hieroglyphic ladybird's diet.
It eats it eats aphids no way, what a shocker in particular the ladybird likes to eat Aphis colunnae the heather aphid not only this, it also really likes to eat the larvae of the heather leaf beetle and the chrysomelid beetles of the genus Altica and, Garralucella this makes it an important biological control agent in particular habitats. And now we come to some interesting facts that make the ladybird unique.
The hieroglyphic ladybird has not been studied much, but there's still a surprising amount to learn about it.
And a 2005 study pointed out that ladybirds are still an under-researched family of beetles, despite the fact that they're so important to the world of farming in terms of their pest control ability and the devastation that aphids and scale insects can cause to crops, and the fact that they're so familiar, the fact their importance in culture and so on, they're still very much an understudied group of animals. The majority of studies of ladybirds only investigate five species.
And of course, the seven spot is at the top of that list. Plus the harlequin ladybird and some of the American species. But with that said, there are a few interesting facts. So, typically, ladybirds have got a range of chemical defences. When they're attacked, they secrete prefix blood from their joints or from their legs. It's usually yellow. Not always. In the case of the cream spot, it's more of an orangey colour. And it usually contains a range of chemicals called pyrazines.
These chemicals are alkaloids. They're usually distasteful, foul-smelling and even toxic, depending on which animal eats the ladybird and how many ladybirds they try to eat, how far they get. In the coccinella genus, which includes the 7-spot, the scare 7-spot, the 11-spot and the hieroglyphic ladybird, among others, typically the chemical defence includes the chemicals coccinelline and pre-coccinelline. There are exceptions to this and I will discuss this in another episode.
But the hieroglyphic ladybird does not contain these chemicals. And one study suggests that it might even not have an alkaline defence at all. One reason suggested for this is that the parasitic wasp, Dinocampus coccinellae, uses the scent of coccinelline and precoccinelline to detect its next host.
This wasp typically attacks seven spots although increasingly it also attacks harlequin ladybirds it has been recorded attacking other types of ladybirds as well it is rather nasty to say the least the larva will eat the ladybird's internal organs and then it will paralyze it so that it comes out of the ladybird and forms a cocoon the ladybird is is is trapped it's paralyzed and it protects the wasp's cocoon and typically lives just long enough to sort of stay there while it hatches.
But as the wasp detects these chemicals and is attracted to them. This may be a reason why the hieroglyphic ladybird could have evolved without them. The other interesting fact I'm about to tell you is quite startling. When I read it, I was a bit floored, I'll be honest with you. So, in some rural parts of India, the hieroglyphic ladybird is used in a traditional remedy to protect against black magic, and it is also used as a traditional cure of asthma.
A study in 2023 by Shafket Jabbar Mir and five other authors, published in the International Journal of Entomology Research, found that practitioners of ethno-medicine in the administrative region of Rishikesh used eight different species to guard against black magic rituals, and also as cures for different ailments and stuff. And Coccinella hieroglyphica was one of them. If you're interested, I've linked the whole paper in the show notes.
I really do recommend reading it. It's really, really fascinating. The local name of the hieroglyphic ladybird in Rishikesh is a kisari. To treat coughs and asthma, the ladybirds are dried in the sun and then consumed whole with honey. If you want to guard against black magic, the ladybirds are then dried and burned. And the smoke that this produces is believed to protect you from black magic curses and all this kind of stuff.
People in the region often lack primary health care they don't always have access to modern medicine so the traditional healers often depend on these insects for their livelihood.
The people who practice this traditional type of healing are known as hakim or vaidh i hope i really hope i'm getting this right um i think it's vaidh but i'm not entirely sure as well as coccinella hieroglyphica the seven spot and a local ladybird coccinella leonina are also used to protect against asthma in this manner and this paper really goes into all the ways that ladybirds are used for traditional healing and i really really recommend it i actually really want to get the
authors on the show at some point so that we can discuss it and it makes the point that this local traditional knowledge can sometimes be used to either develop new medicines or influence the production of existing medicines for example by synthesizing these different types of chemicals in the lab check it out it's really fascinating so thank you very much for listening i hope you've enjoyed this episode if you like the show and want to support me you can donate to me on ko-fi a link is
as always in the show notes you can also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, Music is by Deborah Torrance. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now.