A hot and sunny day on the Suffolk coast found me poking around some brackish pools with muddy margins looking for beetles. I found a fair few but was rather taken with the large numbers of this bug that were pootling about the mud.
I usually ignore bugs apart from the more obvious shieldbugs as there's only one life and it will already take me the next 40 years just to begin to get a grip on the UK's beetle fauna, never mind the hemiptera....
Anyway, I thought these might be 'doable' so brought one home. I got as far as Salididae but then got a little stuck thinking it was a Saldula species.
A quick tweet and the ever helpful Tristan @BritishBugs corrected my mistake and suggested Salda littoralis. One of 3 closely related and similar looking species. However, the pubescent wings (that's hairy to you and me) mean that this one is indeed littoralis.
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