Rethinking How Ladybugs From Elsewhere Are Regarded

Find a ladybug in a Long Island garden and it’s more likely a species that originated in Europe or Asia than a North American native ladybug. Still, as environmental studies scholar Kaitlin Stack Whitney, Ph.D., of the Rochester Institute of Technology points out, ladybug species that came here from different continents are beneficial in the garden, providing effective, all-natural pest control.

In the science studies journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience, Stack Whitney recently published an essay that highlights the benefits of non-native ladybugs while calling out the problems that come with purchasing native ladybugs to release in a garden. She also explored how contempt for the multicolored Asian lady beetle — a ladybug that eats aphids and other garden pests just like native ladybugs do — is rooted in xenophobia.

“The term ‘native’ is often being used as a stand-in for ‘good,’ which implies that anything that’s not native is bad, but you can actually often get the same garden benefits for a gardener from ladybugs that are not considered native,” Stack Whitney said during a recent interview.

The RIT assistant professor in the department of science, technology, and society, who grew up on Long Island in Setauket, said most people who purchase ladybugs do so because they want to do something helpful, namely encouraging beneficial insects rather than using pesticides. But what they don’t realize is that purchasing ladybugs that were caught in the wild can cause harm, she said, such as depleting ladybugs from the area where they are being caught, much like overfishing occurring in an unregulated fishery.

“When you put them in your own garden, they’re likely not going to stay there anyway,” she added.

Purchased ladybugs can simply fly away soon after they are released, and even if they do stick around for a while, there is no guarantee they will establish a population that continues for generations. Rather than buying ladybugs, Stack Whitney advises gardeners to maintain a garden in a way that naturally attracts ladybugs to live there.

“The longer-term, more sustainable answer is conservation biological control,” she said. “It’s about creating and maintaining and improving habitats.”

She said if gardeners order ladybugs when they notice a pest issue, it is already too late. What gardeners should be doing is providing resources for ladybugs, such as food and shelter, and refraining from spraying chemicals, so ladybugs will already be present in the garden at the time pests arrive. “If we’re conserving them around us, then they will be there when a pest outbreak is starting to happen,” she said.

One reason some gardeners place a high value on purchased ladybugs is because they are U.S. native species, she said, however they are typically being harvested from the West Coast. “They’re not necessarily coming from someone rearing them right here in New York State,” she said.

She pointed out that ladybugs are not one kind of insect, but a family of beetles known as Coccinellidae, and there any many different species found in New York State.

Several species are better known as “lady beetles,” the term entomologists prefer because ladybugs are not true bugs. In the United Kingdom, and sometimes here, they are called ladybirds or ladybird beetles.

The nine-spotted ladybug is the New York State insect, though it was thought to be extinct in the state until it was rediscovered on an Amagansett farm in 2011. Other natives include the pink spotted lady beetle and the thirteen-spotted lady beetle. Among the non-native ladybugs found in New York in addition to the multicolored Asian lady beetle are the seven-spotted ladybug, from Europe, and the cardinal ladybird, from Australia.

Mail-order ladybugs are typically convergent lady beetles, the most popular species of ladybug sold for pest control. They, too, are considered natives in New York, but are usually shipped from the other side of the country and could transmit diseases to the ladybugs that are already here.

Ordering ladybugs is “disregarding all the ladybugs we do have around us” and puts the highest value on purchased ladybugs simply because they are native, Stack Whitney said.

She said many ladybugs found in New York are considered adventive, meaning they are not from here but are beneficial. “That’s in contrast to the term ‘invasive,’” she noted. “So there are lots of ladybugs that we see around both New York and elsewhere in the U.S. that are sort of demonized as being really bad.”

She pointed out that those adventive ladybugs that are being demonized are still doing all the good things that native ladybugs are revered for.

“It’s really wrapped up in a long history of conflating basically a fear and a dislike of people from elsewhere with insects from elsewhere and sort of lumping a lot of ills on them,” she said.

There is a push within the field of entomology to replace the common names for insects when those names call out that an insect is from someplace else and villianize it, she said. For example, another name for the multicolored Asian lady beetle, and the name Stack Whitney prefers to use, is the harlequin lady beetle.

Despite devouring pests, harlequin lady beetles are sometimes considered pests themselves because they congregate in winter, occasionally under shingles or inside houses, and they can bite, which some people have an allergic reaction to. But Stack Whitney noted that convergent lady beetles also congregate — that’s what makes it easy for sellers to collect them in great numbers — and all ladybugs can bite.

And most people can’t tell ladybugs apart, she added, so fear-based messaging about insects can lead to people killing the wrong insects, including natives — like how people were killing native wasps in 2020 because they were convinced they had found a “murder hornet.”

“We can’t make generalizations about all of them,” she said of ladybugs. “They do have different life histories, but also we don’t want people going out and killing anything that looks red and round, for example, because they might actually end up harming native ladybird beetles in their quest to eliminate something that’s been really villainized. So it’s just it’s one of those things where it’s all about explaining that it’s more complicated than saying native bugs are good and everything else is bad. That’s just not true in practice.”

Harlequin lady beetles have also been blamed for the decline of native ladybugs because they outcompete native species, but Stack Whitney said that is a simplistic narrative. She pointed to human-created actions such as habitat destruction and “simplifying yards and landscapes,” as the real reason for native ladybug decline. She noted that humans intentionally brought the harlequin lady beetle and other ladybug species to the United States because they knew the beetles would control pests that are a threat to agriculture.

“It’s just a little bit too easy to blame other ladybugs than it is to kind of take responsibility for those changes,” she said.

Gardeners and anyone else who wants to promote ladybug conservation can participate in the Lost Ladybug Project or contribute to iNaturalist.

“With projects like Lost Ladybug, everyone can actually help document the status of the insects around us by just noticing the world around you,” Stack Whitney said. “… Anyone can do that. You don’t need to have a garden to do that. You can just be learning and paying attention to the world around you and taking those broader steps that can help make more biodiversity and the planet more livable in the future.”