Posts
Daily abutilons
Posted by Graeme Lyons , Tuesday, 23 October 2018 21:01
Do you get your abutilons confused with your punctatonervosus? Then look no further. Looking like a couple of gormless smiling evil aliens from Dr Who, are the two species of Scticopleurus we have in the UK. On the left we have Stictopleurus abutilon and on the right Sticopleurus punctatonervosus. Now in Sussex at least punctatonervosus is much commoner than abutilon. I have 23 and 3 records respectively. I see punctatonervosus all over but in huge numbers on Common Fleabane. It's all over Knepp and Butcherlands for example. I have never seen abutilon in in numbers like this though and don't know about any particular plant associations. How do you tell them apart though?
Here we have S. abutilon. There is a curved pale ridge with no dark punctures present running almost parallel to the leading edge of the pronotum. As these are tough bugs, you can hold them in your fingers and see this with a hand lens easy enough.
And the commoner S. punctatonervosus which basically doesn't have the unpunctured pale ridge.
So that's that sorted then. As these two rhopalid bugs are both on the Sussex Shieldbug Atlas, you've got no excuse to not record them now. I await the flood of records. Somehow I don't think I will get double figures of these two in a year on iRecord (unlike the double figures of Western Conifer Seedbug I am getting on a nearly daily basis now).
Posted in
This is exactly the feature I was describing to you last month (though you put it better than I did, to be fair). It's so much easier to get to grips with than the features mentioned on the British Bugs website!