First new species of 2019 and it's.....

...not a beetle!

I managed a quick 20 minutes beating ivy and mistletoe in the garden today. 7 spot Ladybird and Dromius agilis plus lots of diptera ended up in the tray. Also several of these bugs.

I don't have any literature on these and after failing to picture match on the British Bugs website I put my usual call out on twitter to Tristan Bantock who suggested the Minute Pirate bug Cardiastethus fasciiventris. And at 2.2mm it's pretty minute!

This species has a mainly English distribution but also seems to occur in eastern Wales.

Can't find too much else about it online apart from that it's saproxylic i.e. depends on dead and decaying wood. Plenty of that in my garden!!

Anyway, off to a start albeit a slow one.

Happy New Year.

I'll leave you with this from one of my favourite albums of 2018.

Beach buggy

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.

Assassin's Creed

I was out checking the moth trap last night. It was a very warm and muggy evening and there was lots of general insect activity. As I turned to come back in the house, a sudden movement from the wall of the house caught my eye.

It looked quite big and my first thought was that it was a longhorn beetle.

I potted it and soon realised it was a hemipteran (a true bug) with its piercing mouthparts.

A quick search revealed it to be Reduvius personatus, one of the Reduviidae otherwise known as Assassin Bugs. These are predominantly a tropical group of insects but there are 7 species that can be found in the UK.

Reduvius personatus is found around human habitation and feeds on a range of associated insects such as bedbugs, silverfish, booklice and flies.

Can't quite believe that I've never knowingly seen one before!

Bug-on-wall

One of the ladies I work with popped over to my desk last week and asked if I'd seen the weird bug on the wall outside our office.

I popped my head out to see a new bug for me, but one that was immediately recognisable, Western Conifer Seed bug Leptoglossus occidentalis.

Not an unexpected species but this alien invasive was rather smarter than I thought it would be.
Native to the USA and introduced into Europe in 1999, it has since spread rapidly