CCC: Ladybird Close-Up

Closer in large ("L").

There were lots of ladybirds around this afternoon: I'm not sure what was going on (warm wind?) but they were all over the city wall at the end of the garden and the trees and bushes over that side. There were hundreds of them! This pretty specimen was on one of the trees: the lichen can be seen growing on the bark...

Ladybirds are beetles, and their spotty carapaces are in fact modified forewings ("elytra") which have become adapted to form wing-covers. Beetles make up the order Coleoptera (which means "sheath wing"), and are a very successful order of insects, with more described species than are found in any other order: there are approximately 350,000 to 400,000 described species (!). According to Wikipedia, that is 40% of all insect species, and approximately 25% of all animal species.
So numerous are they, in face, that J.B.S. Haldane wrote (in his book What is Life? The Layman's View of Nature):
"The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals. Beetles are actually more numerous than the species of any other insect order."

This is a phrase of which Haldane was very fond, and he repeated it often, usually in the form "God has an inordinate fondness for beetles.".