Transverse Ladybird

Description:

This is Coccinellidae; Coccinellinae; Coccinellini; Coccinella transversalis Fabricius,1781. Wikipedia describes it well: "Measuring 3.8 to 6.7 millimetres (0.15 to 0.26 in) long and 3.3 to 5.45 millimetres (0.130 to 0.215 in) wide, the transverse ladybird shows little variation across its wide range. It has a black head with predominantly bright red or orange elytra boldly marked with a black band down the midline and two lateral three-lobed markings." From me personally, apologies to anyone who looked at this spotting between March 31 and April 14. The Common name and scientific name were both entirely wrong. It was a careless mistake. Sorry. I was looking at a wrong set of notes which I had placed beside the wrong pictures when I was preparing to upload this spotting.

Habitat:

This C. transversalis ladybird was a welcome visitor to our vegetable garden. It was spotted crawling over young seedlings and mature plants alike, hunting for aphids and other small creatures which sometimes do great damage to our crop. In the pictures shown here, it was on Cucumber (Cucumis sativus).