Vivid

Of all the shieldbugs I see regularly, this is the one that puts me most in mind of a child's plastic toy: that cool and vivid green always looks slightly unnatural to my eye. I haven't tweaked the colours here, but I did have to sharpen the image more than I normally would, because it was blowing a hoolie in the wild garden this afternoon, and even a pop of flash wasn't enough to freeze the action as the leaf blew wildly back and forth. The situation wasn't helped by the fact that the bug was uncooperative, but I can hardly blame it for that.

As I mentioned last week, the hawthorn shieldbug is the largest of the Acanthosomatidae, at around 15mm in length, and its size, coupled with its garish summer livery, makes it pretty easy to spot. Some specimens turn quite strongly red in autumn though, and this provides them with some camouflage among the leaf litter where they tend to overwinter. But I don't think that any of my garden bugs will be going into diapause any time soon: despite the howling wind, the temperature is still in the mid-teens, and forecast to stay there for at least another week.

Although there are predatory shieldbugs, most of our UK species (and so far as I know, all the ones in this garden) are sap suckers, using their piercing mouthparts, or beaks, to inject digestive enzymes into the soft tissues of plants and then suck out the resulting soup. Adult hawthorn shieldbugs feed on the leaves and fruit of hawthorn and other trees and shrubs, while the nymphs, which can be found at any time from May to October, prefer a range of high-energy fruits including hawthorn, rowan, cotoneaster, and whitebeam berries.