That Ladybird ain't no lady!

The animal that had a good go at biting me yesterday was a ladybird lava. That is, a ladybird before it has metamorphosed into a proper ladybird. Ever heard that ladybirds are good for the garden? Well what they actually meant to say was that lava are good for the garden. All the adult ladybirds do is look pretty, mate and lay eggs. I picked this chap up with the intention of looking at him through a microscope. Almost as soon as I did he started to bite me. Maybe he was just trying to establish what kind of plant I was. Maybe he just didn't like me. It turned out that he was too quick for that. In fact he was almost too quick for the bigascope until I made a jaw dropping discovery. My camera does slow motion video capture. I have got to admit it, the thought of combining the bigascope with ultra slow motion video capture was almost too much. I had to sit down and have a ginger nut biscuit just to get over it.

So here for your viewing pleasure is a ladybird lava running full pelt in ultra slow motion. Enjoy!

Yes, I know what you are thinking. That does not look like slow motion. Well check out this difficult to film full speed video and you will see it as it really is.

That noise in the background sounds to me like juvenile specimens of the Homo Sapien species. This primate is quite common in these parts, and quite noisy to. That reminds me, what I was doing when I found the ladybird lava was investigating the species that had reclaimed a large spoil heap outside of a newly built school. The idea being that if the ground was surveyed every year, you would witness the re-wilding of the land. The process of identifying everything we saw is a big one but I have nearly completed the task. I'll let you know the results when I have them.