Today a family member bought some lady bugs online and even though the marketing materials and images showed the iconic red/black ladybug, the insects we got looked orangish and had an oblong shape.
I have found some information on the internet that seems to say that we introduced asian beetles to help with pest control of our crops here in the United States , back in the 70s.
I also found a scientific paper that was a study about the hybridization of ladybirds.
Here in the midwest, I had often noted that what I thought was ladybugs were now orange as opposed to the iconic red that still gets used nowadays in any kind of media nowadays. I don't think I've seen that iconic red at all in the past decade. So now I learn these asian beetles are completely different species and so I am wondering if this is just in the US or do iconic ladybugs/ladybirds still exist in Europe?
I'd somehow like to get the iconic red ones if I can find them.
These ones we got online seem more active as well and not as calm as they seemed to be when I was a child.
Have these asian beetles hybridized with our native ladybugs and therefore only hybrids exist now?
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/Entomology/comments/mmdu41/pure_ladybugs/
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