Leaf Miner Beetle

Description:

Coleoptera; Chrysomelidae; Cassidinae; Oncocephalini; Oncocephala tuberculata Olivier, 1792. I thought that this Chrysomelid was difficult to identify, but only because I was not describing it properly in my internet searches. The single most important descriptive word which helped me to find what I think is the correct I.D. was the word "tuberculate". If I had used this word to describe the surface texture of this beetle, it would have been much easier to find. Lesson learned.

Habitat:

Spotted on foliage on the roadside at the edge of the forest. less than 100 metres in one direction from a mangrove swamp and about 50 metres in the other direction from a hillside stream. Around 200 metres from the coast of the South China Sea. So, needless to say, a humid and damp habitat with plenty of vegetation. On closer inspection of the leaf in these rather out-of-focus pictures, I am pretty sure that the plant is Sweet Potato (Ipomoea batatas) which turned out to be the main host of the O. tuberculata. Plant I.D.- http://www.stuartxchange.org/Kamote.html...

Notes:

I will try to find some more informative internet references and add them here. In the meantime, This pdf. is an Indonesian Academic Paper on Oncocephala tuberculata, but it is published in The Philippine Journal of Science and presented by the Dept. of Science and Technology of the Government of the Philippines. I take this to be an advisory doc. for Philippine agriculture, alerting farmers of the presence of this beetle here. I will investigate further: http://scinet.science.ph/union/Downloads...