lady beetles

A few months ago I mentioned the Lost Lady Bug Project. It seems they've updated the site so that visitors can now view all the photo submissions.  Pretty cool.

I've blogged a lot about lady beetles recently.  That's because we have been inundated by them ever since moving to Illinois.  The beetle deluge is not a good thing, though, as ours are nearly all Harmonia axyridis, an extraordinarily pesty species imported from Asia in what must rank as one of the most poorly executed biological control projects ever.  In the wake of the alien lady beetle invasion, our native species have all but disappeared. Enter the Lost Ladybug Project.  The project is a citizen-science initiative out of Cornell University to gather information on the distribution of…