Music. Hello everyone and welcome to Hidden Wings and Bloodlust, a podcast about ladybirds and ladybugs around the world. I'm Rachel and today we've got a special guest from the Netherlands, is it? Yeah, I'm originally from the Netherlands but I'm in Belgium now, yeah. Sorry, how do you say your name? I'm a bit scared of getting it wrong.
It's Michiel, which is very, very, Michiel de Groot, which has a lot of difficult, consonants in there okay yeah yeah usually like in in english-speaking countries it's just fine if it's michael it's just a dutch version of michael okay and um.
Which uh university is it that you're studying at the at the moment uh i'm a phd student at gantt university yeah in gantt in belgium yeah yeah so i moved here from the Netherlands when I started doing my PhD. I thought so, but again, I was a bit scared of pronouncing it wrong again. Okay, so the first question I wanted to ask you is what ladybirds have you seen recently? Well, I'm looking for the harlequin ladybird, the Asian ladybird, harmoniaxer it is.
See not all of those of course and my my lab is right next to the botanical garden so there's quite a few ladybirds in there at any given time but yeah.
Harmonia actually tends to tends to flock at some point in the like late autumn like, there's usually like one last warm day like the last last day of summer kind of and they tend to flock together right after right but the the building i'm in is huge like a huge white, tall building that looks on the south so it actually like it kind of acts like a giant, light screen in a way so like two or three weeks back we had harmonia flying into the whole building and like all over the walls
and i was teaching a class and they were coming into the window and we kind of like half stopped the class just to kind of catch a few because we need them for the research um so yeah so even though like i usually like that that's the ladybird i look most at like even in the wild that's the one i've seen recently um yeah there's a video somewhere of me the day after going into a classroom and like the teacher looking at me skeptically well take something off the ceiling
yeah there's a whole bunch of ladybirds there nice yeah the. Harlequin is just the harlequin ladybird just seems to be everywhere um like last year i actually didn't see so many i saw more of the seven spots but but i think like a lot of the time that is like the time of year like they don't seem to like it like cold weather so much um but yeah.
Um yeah last year i saw a few harlequins and like now to like this winter i'm seeing like more harlequins again yeah yeah yeah yeah okay so what's your what's your favorite ladybird, oh that's um really like the orange ones you get a lot of the graveyards around ghent and you around this time of year they usually crawl to the the gravestone yeah it's very fun yeah you, There was a special one which was introduced to me by my supervisor who was
very excited about ladybirds. It was the briny ladybirds. Yes, yes. Yeah, no, I like the briny ladybird. It's also orange, but it has black spots rather than white spots, which the orange ladybirds do. It's on briny, the plant, usually on the coast. I've seen them and they do look very cool like they're very, it's kind of weird because they kind of look like a very you know like a cartoon of a ladybird it kind of looks like that.
Like if someone like if a kid drew a cartoon of a ladybird that's probably what it would look like, yeah yeah yeah yeah like all the spots the same size yeah yeah yeah I know what you mean yeah.
But I'm kind of stealing his favorite ladybird I think it's his like avatar on all social media I also really like the zigzag one from Southeast Asia oh yeah yeah i remember i remember i remember that ladybird that that was that was pretty cool hello minus yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's exactly yeah so last year i was in ghana um visiting a friend and i saw like one of the most amazing ladybirds that i've ever seen in my life it was like it was bigger than.
A seven spot and i think i've heard that it was probably it's not sure what it was it it was probably helamina's lunata um and it was it looks like someone had painted on it um in terms of the color and stuff it turned it looked yeah it looked like someone had painted on it and it um it was bigger than a seven spot it was massive and it was uh like you absolutely couldn't miss it um and it was the black background black pink and a black background yeah yes yeah
yeah the yeah the pink one yeah yeah that was that was that was yeah it did look it looked really cool i also like the 16 spot um you see loads of them congregating on um. Different aggregations of them on fence posts and on uh trees and stuff um yeah and they're they're pretty cool yeah i've seen quite a few of those yeah yeah yeah they tend to like the long grass but you can't think you can get them anywhere. Yeah, they're the ones that you see a lot in fans' posts. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think... The thing is, when you see them, you never just see one, either. You always see, like, multiple... So, tell me about the research that you're doing at the moment. So, yeah, I'm a PhD student, just starting my last year. Kind of scary. And I'm originally an evolutionary biologist. That was my master. And then I kind of did some theses on beetles mostly. Yeah. And then I got asked if I would apply for this research on parasitic fungi on ladybirds.
And I got it, obviously, because I'm here now. And so I'm actually at the Department of Mycology right now, and I don't really have a lot of mycological background at all. Like I don't know much about mushrooms I help in autumn like carrying the shopping bags full of mushrooms but for the practicals you know.
But now I'm specifically working on a group called the Labo Benialis which is a group of fungi which all infects various kinds of arthropods and, my specific, goal species is Asperomyces the genus Hesperomyces they all infect ladybirds and then my specific one is Hesperomyces harmoniae which specifically infects harmonia oximeters, so I'm looking at various things like I'm looking what factors make infection more common and then after infection what kind of factor,
like temperature or humidity that kind of thing makes it grow better you know, and also trying to see where it comes from getting people around the world to collect them for genetic analysis but also like ecological analysis like where did you find it and at what time I mean can look up the ecological factors of that so yeah all kinds of things surrounding pretty much this one species, it helped that is by far the easiest double-blind Alice to collect because there are so many Harlequins.
So why do you think it is important to know about this.
Um well one there's if there's a few reasons um i mean except for like the fundamental reason of like trying to understand like biodiversity right and like how that works yeah um that's a fundamental, um knowledge gap of course like you kind of want to know what what's happening in the world but then like you can look at all kinds of species and you need to kind of pick and choose right so this one is, of interest because it's relatively easy to find and relatively easy to manipulate
of a group that has been completely understudied so anything you can do with it you can kind of as kind of a model organism for the rest of the group you can look at it like that, the other reason is that of course the harlequins are very invasive they're like invasive all over the world, and it's kind of interesting from an evolutionary perspective, an ecological perspective also an invasive biology perspective how do parasites
of an invasive species follow them around the world because that might not happen immediately, it might happen a little bit afterwards, and one of the ideas then also is that maybe certain combinations of parasites or pathogens can be used as a natural biocontrol for these species. So could it does it ever jump species? Like could a fungus that has infected a harlequin, could it go on to infect say a two spot? Yeah, that's one of the main questions I'm looking at.
And we kind of think that it happens in lower amounts for it like as some background, Asperomyces harmoniae which is this particular harlequin.
Beetle hanger it originally was part of a species called Hesperomyces fluorescence it turns out that almost every single ladybird has its own, Laboblenialis so they're all different species when you look at it from if you do the genetic analysis it turns out, that Hesperomyces fluorescence is like a whole bunch of species so like almost every single host species has a different Asperisus species um, But we're still disentangling all that. So there's a lot of species that aren't described at all.
So we're asking people and we see observations online of Hesperomyces on certain ladybirds that we haven't described yet. And we ask them to send them to us and we can do some analysis. But the other thing is that I'm also doing experiments in the lab where I'm actually trying to transfer.
Hesperomyces harmoniae from the harmonias from the harnacans to another species um and there it turns out there is actually like some kind of quite low but there is a uh transmission rate very often they don't grow to be mature or they don't attach or they don't uh so it's low but it's it seems to be there so if you're looking at it from like evolution that's that's probably how that goes okay yeah because when i i remember But ages ago, I did the episode on the Harlequin ladybird.
And at that time, I don't think that they thought. I think they were just calling it all Hesperomyces virucens because they didn't know that there was a fungus for each ladybird. Yes. Okay. Are there any ladybirds? So can every ladybird get infected by one of these? Like Canna Seven Spot, for instance? Well, in the lab, yes. I've successfully gotten Hasperomyces armonia onto seven spots. But in the wild, you basically never see that.
I don't think I've ever seen a seven spot with Hasperomyces on it. And the reasons why we don't exactly know, like seven spots and armonia don't necessarily encounter each other a lot in the wild. They're both super common, so you'd expect it to happen sometimes. So there's a difference there in if you force them to be infected versus if it just gets infected naturally in the wild yeah, One thing to note, by the way, or one thing I should tell because it's interesting,
is the way we infect them is kind of weird. Okay. Because we want to know what influences the infection. So we kind of need to time it, right? They all need to actually be infected at the same time. Right, yeah. Otherwise, you get weird data. So the way we infect them is we put some infected ladybirds into a little tube. Right. And then we put a bunch of unaffected ladybirds in a tube with them. Okay.
And then we use a hot dog roller, which is not very scientific equipment, but the hot dog roller is like, you know, the rollers that turn sausages in the front of like snack bars and that kind of thing. Right, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was one of those. And we took out the heating elements so that we don't get like grilled ladybirds, right? No. We took out the heating elements and we put the little tubes on the rotors. Yeah. And then they keep falling over each other because the fungus is transferred
by touch. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. And so then we know the exact moment that they will get infected or within an hour or something. So that's how we do it. Yeah, I was just saying that. I wonder because the ladybears that go in those aggregations, like the 16 spot and also the hard equipment, if they're all touching each other, it must be easy for the fungus to be transmitted. Yes. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, yeah.
So for reference, like, the fungus itself is, like, a little banana-shaped balloon. It's completely filled with spores. And, like, whenever a mature fungus is touched, then the spores kind of erupt from the top side, and they affect a new host. So yeah, most of the time the infection occurs when the ladybirds are mating. So you see it a lot. Or in those winter aggregations. That's how you see it all the time. And can it infect a larva or just another ladybird?
No, that's something we've never seen. Yeah, that's something it's been asked a lot too. And especially like if you keep them like to the adults like from the parents but no we've never seen it, it doesn't seem possible So, what actually happens to the ladybird once it gets infected like what does it actually do. That's a good question, and we still actually don't know too much about it. It seems like we're constantly calling it a parasite, right?
Because that's what it looks like, that's what it seems to be. But we're not really sure what the negative effects on ladybirds are. There's some research that shows that, for example, in winter, the mortality is a little bit higher when they're infected versus when they're not.
Then again, if you're looking at more infected ladybirds, they might also be a little bit older you know, clearly like if the fungus gets in the way of like a leg like a wing or something that's bad for them that, stops them from being as mobile does that happen or it does happen but it does seem to be like random chance rather than a thing that the fungus is like aiming for or something it's just for the most part they seem to live quite long even when they're pretty heavily infected so.
There's clearly some negative effects because the fungus has to get nutrients from somewhere but whether it's also getting it from the air or something is still pretty unclear, we're looking to do some experiments on that as well and one thing we have done is like is use electron microscopy after on a ladybird after it's been infected and you can see that for this species at least, it kind of creates a hole in the elytra or the outside of the ladybird so clearly
there is a mechanical effect there that doesn't seem very healthy surely you're more susceptible to pathogens or something does it affect the flight? Or not it only seems to be well it can't it doesn't grow on the wing so it it is it is only on the the heart outside part um so if it affects the flight it's it's like kind of on the side and it gets in the way okay yeah so that happens sometimes but yeah i've seen them fly with with a lot of fungus on there so yeah.
So, I did an episode about the orange ladybird a few weeks ago, and I read when I was researching the episode that the Hesperomyces fungus had been found on it. Is it very common? Because when I've seen them in the wild, I've pretty much only ever seen a couple of them on the Harlequin.
Is that something you frequently get on the orange ladybird? then um for the orange lilybird it's somewhat common you have to really look for them they can be um depending on the species can be harder to see them just because like the the aspermises itself is kind of yellow greenish on top of an orange it can be tricky for the black ones it's super hard to see if they have hairs it gets harder to see but i don't think there's any any
of them that's quite as common as the one on the harlequin yeah yeah that one is super super common and what other ladybirds has it been found on aspromises yeah uh lots lots of different ones um here we uh are in the process of describing one on adalia the really two two spots yeah yeah. And so it's on Halisia, what do you call Halisia? There's one on, let's see, what else is there? It's like on so many different ladybots we have, but a lot of the research has been done in the U.S.
As well. so you get a lot of US ladybirds in there where it actually has been described but yeah we actually I just saw an observation and we just got the ladybird in from Australia from an Australian one yeah, wow so it somehow got there as well so it's really a worldwide phenomenon yeah I'm okay so it's also on Olaf a. nigrum which is, I'm not sure what some of the common names are that's an American ashy grey lady beetle from the US yeah I've heard of that one,
so we were talking about Gelumenes earlier it's on some species of Gelumenes oh really wow, yeah on both species of Adalia we have here so that's the two spot and the ten spot right yeah and then on Helisia of course it's an orange ladybird, in the US you also have Cycloneida.
The spotless ones which are very pretty yeah, blood red lady beetle or the spotless lady beetle but there's many many more those were the ones that were described in, research that showed it was a species complex but there's many many, different kind of hosts for them yeah do the ladybirds ever get rid of the fungus like do they ever fight it off or it doesn't seem it doesn't seem something they are able to do like uh for the label
in general um there is a bunch of arthropods that get infected uh yeah actually the ones we do see them like detach them sometimes are the social ones so for ants for example other ants will come and like groom them or like bite it off a little bit. So there they do fall off. But the problem is that in the Labo Penialis, there are a few different structures between the species.
So you have to imagine this elongated little banana shape, and at the end of it, where it attaches to the host, there's like a foot. It's usually like fairly black. If you look at the ladybird on their microscope, you can kind of see the black spots where Asperomysus starts to grow. That's a very typical way of seeing it. But in some species, it has something called the house thorium, which is kind of like a drill that goes through the upper surface. Oh!
Like a plant, which is probably the best way to describe it. And that exists for some species. And for some species it doesn't, so it kind of, in that case, it's very, it attaches just very much on the top, upper surface.
Obviously, for those species, it's easier to detach them, but for ladybirds, they do have a hostoryum, and it goes quite far in, so it's very hard for them to attach, and actually, like, even in the lab, when we kind of, like, push them around, and we brush them aside, and all that, and, like, they basically never fall off, so they can, Take quite a bit of mechanical force. Oh, wow. Yeah, I suppose it's evolved to do that. Wow. So, oh yeah, can it grow on a dead one?
No. On a dead ladybird? No. And actually, one of the things we notice in the lab is that, so whenever we do a count of how many fungi there are on the ladybirds, we have to be pretty fast if the ladybird dies because the fungus will shrivel and die off as well pretty quickly afterwards. And at that point, they might actually fall off as well. So you need to be checking them very often. So yeah, they don't grow on that ladybird. Okay.
Okay, so when I was doing the episode on the Harlequin a long time ago, there was a theory that there was um certain certain like very small types of fungi that were called uh microsporidia that were found in the not on the surface of the harlequin ladybird but on like the on the inside of it and that meant that when the when the harlequin ladybird was attacked or like when something ate when another ladybird ate it like a two spot when a two-spot larvae ate a Harlequin larva they they,
died in a lot of cases pretty quickly and, that's nothing to do with the Labuliaris is it. No, it's a different kind of fungus. It is interesting in the sense that I've seen that research, sadly. I think there hasn't been much published on it since, I don't know, like seven years ago or something. It's interesting.
One of the things people look at when looking at invasive species is something called pathogen pollution, which is where an invasive species takes along a pathogen of any kind, a parasite or like a disease or whatever with them and it doesn't affect the invasive species much but it does affect like similar species in the new area it settles in right, and that microsporidia story is kind of part of that, and like espermysis might be part of that as well because we don't really know
where it came from in the first place where it came from its original, habitat or somewhere else. Is Hesperomyces, could it be beneficial to the ladybird in any way? I mean, it doesn't seem like it is, but could it be? No, it doesn't seem like it is. At least not in a way we've been able to tell. If anything, it slightly hampers their mobility.
As far as we can tell it doesn't make them like i don't know more attractive to other lady birds or something that would be interesting to look at of course right like because the from the fungus perspective they kind of want to see uh lady birds mate or something so who knows uh but that that's never been looked into that might be interesting if yeah transfer some something to or makes it more colorful and that's why it's yellow you know yeah i think yeah um but
not that we know of no no oh yeah you mentioned about the citizen science do you want to talk a bit about that oh yeah so at the start of my uh my phd um and in general right like um we've started a bunch of projects on citizen science trying to get people around the world basically to collect ladybirds with uh fungal infections so yeah well one of the things we kind of run into is that whenever, like I'm in the department of mycology, right?
But mycologists in general, especially amateur mycologists, they'll be looking at mushrooms on the ground, right? Or like maybe sometimes some kind of lichen or. Like rust or whatever, but they won't be collecting insects, right? That's the entomologist's job. And then if you go to the entomologist, they're not really looking at fungi. Right. So you you kind of fall between two stools, right, in that case.
So one of the things we're trying with some various citizen science players is to, well, first of all, make people aware that this exists.
Like, for, because has promises, you can, see with the naked eye on especially on harlequins you can see them with the naked eye uh but you need to know it exists because otherwise people just think it's like pollen or some some dirt or something like yeah because i'm sure i've seen it and thought that it was just dirt or something yeah so so a large part of it is like making people aware of it like showing nice pictures um that kind of thing and then also um
we started a big database called beetle hangers which is kind of the somewhat common name for hesperomyces beetle hangers.
So where we collect all the data and, so that's one part of it and we're still collecting them, we're collecting that data via basically any given citizen science website so your bi-naturalist or your observation or the ladybird app that kind of place, and also in addition to that there's a very recent like only a few months old, European wide project called Fundive which is specifically for under described or under researched species of fungi across Europe and has promisages part of that,
research and they also have their own website, so that's part of it so a big part of what I'm doing is not just doing the research in the lab and collecting them in the field but also getting, various groups to try to get people to send us ladybirds basically or at least send us a photo if possible because there's a combination of like look we want to look at the ecological data if you find as premises on, a ladybird where it hasn't been described yet, it's very likely to be a new
species, which is great. Also, we're trying to figure out the genetics. So we're trying to get the ladybird with the fungus from all over the world. And right now, I've got it from a lot of places in a combination of researchers and scientists. And also, because it's nice, as general outreach, it's good information for people. to inform people.
If they found it on a rare ladybird, I'm just trying to think of the, If they found it on a ladybird that you wouldn't necessarily want to see a fungus on, would there be a way to treat it in any way? Is there any way to get the ladybird to produce antibodies or anything like that? Not as far as I know. It just seems kind of stuck in that sense. They do have a problem in that sense.
I mean, probably, but again, we don't know enough about it, but there is some defensive mechanism at the start, like when it tries to attach, but once it has fully grown, it's probably not going to de-attach anymore. Okay, yeah, yeah. So is there anything else you want to talk about? Oh, we've gone over quite a lot. It's yeah yeah well we still got a couple minutes left on the meeting I think oh is it are we getting time yeah it's, we've got three minutes left or something yeah.
It might be interesting to mention that like because I've gotten trying to get harlequin ladybirds from all over the world this samurai was in Japan for the international conference of entomology which happened there in Kyoto and of course the harlequin ladybird, it's originally from eastern Asia so it is from, eastern China so it's a native species it is a native species there so one of the things I've done is ask various researchers from around the world to collect around a hundred,
harlequin ladybirds for me right which is here at least it's super easy to do because like if they flock together you just kind of like oh there's a hundred you just have them in an hour or something what i didn't quite realize and that was kind of a learning moment for me is that, um of course like if you go back to the place where it's native it's it's not that common so in japan it's it's just a normal a normal um pine specialist
so kind of that's interesting Harmonia Quadrant Puntata the Cream Street Ladybird yeah, Creamshake red ladybird is for us, it's a pine specialist. That's kind of what it is in Japan. How did it get so invasive then? If it's not that common there? Well, it was very much helped by people, right? It was introduced in greenhouses and that kind of place because it is very voracious. It's a very hungry ladybird that likes eating a lot of aphids,
right? And then it's inevitably escaped first in North America and then in Europe. So it wasn't a natural thing. It was a human action that got it all over the world. So, yeah. But yeah, the professors there in Japan were like, 100, that will take me a while. And it was like, will it take me a while? It takes me like an hour. I know.
Not realizing that. Oh, yeah, of course. Of course, yeah, it makes sense because it's a native species there, so of course it's in a lower amount of locations and it's hard to find. That was interesting. That's interesting. Of the ladybears, was there a mutation when it became invasive to make it more invasive? Because I've heard that theory before from someone that they think it might have mutated when it left Asia. I mean, there's a bottleneck there, right? Like, you have, like,
a certain group of it. I don't know about any specific mutations. Yeah. But one thing that's interesting is that some of the enemy species that we have here for ladybirds are now adapting to also attack Harmonia. Yeah. Like the Ifnemonid Palsy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They start attacking Harmonias when in the past they didn't do it as much. And now they're doing it more Yeah I know, I noticed that too.
I think it's going to go in less than one minute. I don't know if you want me to make another meeting again. Maybe to run it off or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Otherwise we're waiting for it to end right now. Oh, yeah, yeah. Ah, there we go. So is there anything else you wanted to talk about? Yeah. Well, I just wanted to, I don't know, shout out to the lab, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so shout out to the lab. We have a little club of people in the mycology
lab now all working on various kinds of labobalbanialis. Oh, okay, yeah. Including some people on ladybirds, but also people on cockroaches.
Oh, yeah. Also on bat flies, which are interesting. there are these parasites of bats which then also have their own labo benialis parasites on them so it's like hyper parasite thing going on and all all kinds of species yeah um it's all together like we're kind of called team labo we have our own little logo some mugs recently made oh nice, someone should try someone should do like a cake make a cake.
In the shape in the shape of that, Hesperomyces or something oh yeah you could have like a ladybird cake with candles in the shape of Hesperomyces I know I know, yeah do they ever do the do they ever infect other.
Invertebrates like woodlice or anything like that yeah yeah a lot of different they're found on millipedes as well and harvest bin, so like except for all the kinds of insects they infect they can look very strange like some of them are they infect some water beetles as well so they can live underwater yeah it can actually live underwater yes and the way it transfers between species it's like this really bizarre cornucopia shape
so they get all these bizarre looking shapes it's an interesting a very beautiful group to look at, but it's impossible to see it properly without a microscope and without making slides. So it gets tricky in that sense. Yeah, yeah.
Okay and um they've never they can't they can't obviously they can't infect humans can they or or anything like no no they very clearly like one of the things they very clearly need is is like, integuments or like an outside of like an art football yeah that's how they attach and like it wouldn't work for us no no also for all kinds of other reasons but you know yeah yeah i mean that seems like sorry that's quite an obvious thing that it couldn't do it but i just wanted
to clarify that for no no it's a question it's a question you get quite often especially after like uh you know your cordyceps and the last of us things that's mycologists get that.
Also also i think i also i think people don't necessarily necessarily understand it but yeah it's it yeah but i mean um i guess like not much is not much still not much is known i mean you say you still don't know all of the effects that it could have or yeah yeah okay yeah it's tricky to figure out because like these species you can't culture so for some other parasitic species you can can culture on like agriplates right in the lab um but double banalis always
need a live host to grow properly so you need to have this whole setup where you have can keep insects and keep them fed and happy and then like have them be infected and have that go well um so for for ladybirds for example if you're keeping ladybirds you kind of also want to keep aphids to keep the ladybirds fed and to keep the aphids fed you need to have some plants so you need to grow some plants and all together like it's
this whole setup and then like a huge like it's very labor intensive of course yeah of course yeah can that can it infect like is there a fungus that can affect an aphid? I guess it can. That's a good question. Not that I know of, but when I'm thinking of fungi that infect them, I'm always thinking of something like Labobinalis or Cordyceps, which might exist, but quite a few species are infected by some kind of microsporidians, like we were talking about. Yeah, yeah.
The smaller ones that infect the hemolymph or something like that. Yeah, okay. Well, I can't think of anything else I want to ask. So where can people learn more about this research then? So we started a whole website called digitalhangers.org. So you can go to digitalhangers.org. It's also where you can find all the information if you encounter something and you want to send it to us or you want to send us a photo, something like that, it's a little on there.
Yeah, you can also go to the website of my supervisor, which is danihalavaters.org. He also has a website talking about your level banalists in general. Yeah, those are the main places where you can find easily accessible information. It also gives you links if you want to read further to the articles you might want to see.
Yeah, or ask us. I mean we're always open to questions so just send us a DM or an email or something like that that's always welcome can I put your, in the episode description can I put your blue sky name of course, I'll also give you the links for the websites and such yeah please do okay.
Well thank you very much it's been really interesting having you on the show and um good luck with your research yeah thank you so much yeah it was fun to be on there yeah, well thanks we'll hopefully um find out some more um things about um about these fungi um now it's been really really interesting talking to you thank you so much thank you all right cool.