Insect Picture of the Day

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Special thanks to bugguide.net for identifying this insect for me. This is a billbug, or curculionidae rhynchophorhinae. (I’m talking about the big bug. We’ll get to little bug standing on its head in a moment.) Billbugs are bad news for lawns. You must deal with them immediately upon sight, because billbug larvae eat the roots of turf, leaving the green shoots above to die. By the time you see them, parts of your apparently green lawn are already dead. If you wait for your grass to turn brown before dealing with the billbugs, you’re in for a seriously damaged lawn.

If you have dead patches on your lawn (that don’t have obvious causes, like fungus or dog turds sitting in the middle of them), you can check for billbugs quite easily: reach down and tug on a patch of dead grass. If it lifts up easily with no rootball underneath it, you’ve got billbugs (or a similar root-eating pest).

I took this picture out on my lawn yesterday (the background is actually the irrigation control lid out by the sidewalk), so I will be applying pesticides to my lawn today. That’s a fully-grown billbug. I’d like to hope it grew up somewhere else and came to my lawn late, but I’m a realist: my lawn is probably quite damaged and I’m in for a long spell of reseeding and patching.

The little critter doing a very passable Leonardo DiCaprio imitation from the bow of this billbug is a mite. I do not know if it has parasitized the billbug for sure, but I suspect it has not: mites frequently use beetles in a form of commensalism called phoresy. Commensalism is a form of symbiosis in which one species benefits while the other is neither helped nor harmed. Phoresy is a form of commensalism in which one species uses another for transportation.

In other words, that mite isn’t standing on that billbug: he’s riding it.