by Trish Wells
Crop pests eat our food. Natural enemies are species which kill pests and include predators, parasitoids and pathogens. Natural enemies are good. Having lots of different natural enemies working in the same place, having a big team, is seen as a good thing because as things change, for example over the season or under different land management practices, it is more likely that one member of the team will be able to kill the pests. BUT! Some of the team members don’t care what they eat; they eat pests and team mates alike. How will this affect the pest populations?
There is a relatively large field within biological control research looking at this. Questions that people are working on include: How many natural enemy species do we need to maintain the levels of pest suppression we currently enjoy? Do we really need them all? If we add a particularly hungry predator will that be good because it eats more pests or will it be bad because it eats more natural enemies which may reduce the stability of pest suppression?
The ladybird (lady beetle) called the Harlequin or the multicoloured asian ladybeetle (Harmonia axyridis Pallas) is one such troublesome hungry predator. In addition, it’s a foriegn species! So everything it does in its new habitats is unusual; can the new ecosystems cope with this? This is the subject of my thesis, it took me months to think of a way to marry these two ideas, I bored people to tears when i came up with the (in retrospect obvious) solution. Anyway, below is a harrowingly beautiful clip featuring natural enemy death by the Harlequin ladybird. I helped a photographer make it.
Amazing footage Trish!
Awesome video. I think it is great that, what most people consider to the a cute, pretty ‘bug’, is actually such a voracious killing machine.
Any details on the videographic setup for this? What sort of camera and lighting was used.
Welcome to the SFSN!
Nicely neatened up Becky! We used two camera’s for the filming, a camcorder for most of the footage but the ladybird cleaning footage was done on the film setting of a digital SLR, I’ll get more info from the photographer in the morning. For lighting we used stand alone work lights which used LEDs, from Lidl, a cheap German supermarket, again I’ll get proper details in the morning. Was quite frustrating at times, the light couldn’t be too bright or warm because that made the ladybirds move faster and fly off. And you can see in some of the clips that the depth of focus was only a couple of mm, tough for a moving subject, we have hundreds of clips where the photogapher (we’ll call him Peter from now on) desperately tried to catch the focus but just lagged behind the insect, that’s why we have lots of shots of the insect moving horizontaly.
With all these complaints though, when you’re shooting beautiful ladybirds on beautiful green plants you have an easy subject to work with. Stunning colours, we could focus on catching the behaviours and didn’t have to try to be imaginative and make it pretty.
Yeah, my stomatopods also lend themselves nicely to photography. I don’t think I would particularly enjoy studying something dull and drab.
Peter the photographer says: The cameras that we used were a Panasonic SD5 camcorder and +4 and +10 supplementary lenses, and Nikon D-90 with I think 60mm and 105mm Macro lenses.
It’s very useful having a photography department encorporated into our institute.
Really cool video! And welcome to the network!
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[...] art and poetry we segue into FOOD: Trish Wells has a lovely film of a Ladybird eating her colleagues at The Birds, the Bees and Feeding the World, and you can consume Bug Soup! posted at Insect [...]
[...] art and poetry we segue into FOOD: Trish Wells has a lovely film of a Ladybird eating her colleagues at The Birds, the Bees and Feeding the World, and you can consume Bug Soup! posted at Insect [...]
[...] Trish’s last video post was is a close-up view of her experiments and is called ‘Ladybird eats colleagues’. [...]
[...] So, when you’re enjoying some time outdoors keep a look out for ladybirds and report your sightings. Don’t forget to look out for larvae too – like the beautiful harlequin larva in the photograph. If you need help with identification you can download ID sheets for adults and larvae. To help with your hunt I will leave you with this incredible close-up video of a Harlequin eating its dinner. [...]