Dogbane Leaf Beetle

Here's yet another Dogbane Leaf Beetle, one of my favorite beetles. I've talked about them before, though this fella might have been about to perform one of its predator-evasion techniques. As vegetarians, they're not particularly fierce, so they defend themselves in 3 ways:

  1. Because they eat poisonous plants (dogbanes and milkweeds), they are somewhat poisonous themselves. While many aposematic insects signal being poisonous with red/orange coloring (e.g. Monarch butterflies, Large and Small Milkweed Bugs, Red Milkweed Beetles), the Dogbane Leaf Beetle might be advertising the same thing through its shiny coloring.
  2. Presumably also because of their poisonous diet, they can also spray a predator with some noxious chemicals.
  3. But when all else fails, they'll look to escape by going to the edge of a leaf and jumping off, hopefully into grass or leaf litter than they can hide in. I suspect this little fella miscalculated the threat of me and my camera, and was thinking of leaf-diving to escape from me.

July 14, 2021 at Duke Farms
Photo 148187114, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


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