In the middle of the southern Japanese metropolis of Fukuoka, on the grounds of Kyushu University itself, biologists have discovered a new type of ladybug. It is not surprising that it had previously escaped attention: the animal is inconspicuously black and measures barely more than a millimeter, as small as a grain of sand.
But PhD student Ryōta Seki from the Entomological Laboratory knew exactly where to look. These tiny ladybugs that feed on spider mites like to live in pine trees, so Seki decided to take a look at the trees across from the university museum on the Hakozaki campus. There he indeed found tiny ladybugs on the needles, which he later managed to identify as a completely new species. The animal was given the scientific name of the species pinicola meaning ‘pine dweller’.
Ladybugs of the genera Stethorus and Parastethorus have been little studied because the species can often only be distinguished from each other on the basis of differences in the structure of their sexual organs. This means that the animals must be picked apart under the microscope for the correct identification.
Together with his supervisor Munetoshi Maruyama, Seki made a new one inventory of this group of ladybirds in Japan. In addition to the species on their own campus, they discovered another new species on the northern island of Hokkaido: Stethorus takakoae.
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