High-flying ladybug swarm shows up on National Weather Service radar | Hacker News Reader

High-flying ladybug swarm shows up on National Weather Service radar

latimes.com

97 pointsleothekim52 comments

I have a question. Does anyone know why insects sometimes go so high? I went to Chicago last year and I went to the top of the Hancock building and I went to top floor, the observatory, to look out and see the surrounding area. And a dragonfly flew by outside. Why would it be up that high? What's the point? There is nothing up there. On the wide open plains of the west, there are not many reasons for insects to go so high, so why do they?

Reaching for the stars?

I remember talk about a similar ladybug swarm back when I was a kid. It was a dry summer and it was assumed they were looking for areas with more water.

Other than that, insects are often quite small and their altitude varies with the weather. Low-flying swallows are seen as a sign of coming rain here in Finland, as the insects are closer to the ground when the atmospheric pressure is low.

Usually migration, or just because they got caught by the wind/hot air bubble. It's not like a fall from any height can harm them anyway.

https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100204/full/news.2010.54.ht...

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/06/01/128389587/l...

I'm just speculating, but safety might be a reason. "Nothing up there" means there are fewer predators around. And if they do want to reach you, it will cost them a lot of work, while you got free potential energy from an updraft.

Or the annoyance of that one mosquito making up to your 45th story apartment in NYC, how does it know to get up there and through my tiny cracked window!?

They're light and so probably caught in an updraft. Then, sensing your CO2, they found you.

You may have standing water nearby.

On the other hand, it's NYC. There's standing water everywhere.

The disintegrating wooden water tanks on the roof?

It may have been carried up by an updraft along a warm side of the building.

One thing I was surprised to learn is that ladybugs migrate like butterflies. In California, there are secret locations in the Sierras where they overwinter before flying off into the central valley. https://youtu.be/Y3v8AogAK7U?t=295

In the South they find secret locations like your window seal[1], door frame, or house siding only to come out in the hundreds when the time is right. They used to infest the schools I went to.

Some people even put them into their garden to kill bugs. The article said they love aphids.

[1]https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-ladybird-ladybug-nest-on-w...

Well, at least they're ladybugs. I don't know how much of this is just due to the name, but I like ladybugs. They're red and pretty, and they don't sting or bite or swarm around my food.

...this all seems too pleasant, so feel free to educate me on how ladybugs are actually the worst insects ever. :(

Anyone who tells you ladybugs are terrible is probably just an aphid posing as a human to spread propaganda.

To add something interesting to the story, just one data point aka anecdote though:

8 years or so ago we got a aphid attack on my plum tree that I killed off with spray (systemic. IIRC, so it would kill of those bugs even when it didn't hit them directly.)

A couple of years later the aphids where back and I wouldn't spray it again so I started looking for alternatives.

One thing I figured out was I had also a ant problem in the same tree, so I got rid of those and that helped quite a bit but had to be repeated from time to time.

A couple of years later ladybugs started to show up and this year I counted 6. Considering each of them can eat 100 aphids a day or so they are very welcome :-)

A few possible explanations, won't go into rating them:

- maybe it was all random

- maybe ladybugs are more sensitive to insect spray than aphids are (would make sense since they prey on aphids and systemic insecticides could/would accumulate up in the food chain.)

- maybe the ant colony had been keeping the ladybugs away the first year the aphids attacked (I don't know but it is widely known that ants and aphids often form a symbiotic relationship so it wouldn't surprise me a bit if they also defended their source of yummy sugar.)

- maybe my plum tree was just to small to pick up a collection of ladybugs the first year.

- or maybe a combination.

From totally unscientific observations I made as a young child: the ants actually deploy and protect the aphids like cattle. I remember seeing ants literally carry ladybugs away from the aphids.

Wish I was that patient when I was young :-)

Meanwhile I've been looking around and while most of the results here aren't scientific studies they still support our observations:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ants+aphids+relationship&t=fpas&ia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism

I remember reading that in a book when I was about 6 or 7 and it turned my childhood obsession of dinosaurs into one of ants.

Same with fingernail or toenail clippings.

I pruned my roses a few years ago and within minutes the cut stems were seething with aphids. I tried to get rid of them with some mild bug spray (iirc it was pyrethrum or similar) but they just ignored it, and I needn't have bothered because within half an hour there were dozens of ladybugs eating the aphids. It was amazing how fast both species homed in on their respective targets.

Harmonia axyridis were imported to nothern america and europe for this reason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonia_axyridis

and yes ants protect their cattle from ladybugs

They bite, though. They bite me, anyway. Well, I guess I am assuming it's a bite, because whatever it is they do on my skin, it hurts.

I haven't seen any ladybugs here in Western Ohio in the last 7 - 10 years. We see a lot of a similarly-sized and shaped beetle that's orange with brown spots, but the familiar red and black-spotted ladybugs I remember from my youth seem to have disappeared. These orange doppelgängers come indoors in droves as the fall weather gets cooler. They mass in clumps in corners of windows around my house. They are not at all endearing like the ladybugs they seem to have replaced.

Oh, ugh. I searched for an answer and came up with this: https://soapboxie.com/social-issues/Where-Have-All-The-Ladyb...

It looks like we introduced the invasive Asian ladybirds and ended-up killing off most of the native ladybirds. Now I have smelly orange beetles trying to get into my house. Thanks, other humans!

(It's times like these that I think the last human dying can't come quickly enough.)

I was in my summerhouse last year when a swarm showed up and within minutes the whole house was getting black and they were trying to get into the house. I made a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xst1HYJK9Og Seeing them in such huge numbers is terrifying, I totally see why people during biblical times thought the end was nigh.

That was October last year and they got into my car. Now in Sweden I saw some of them crawling out of the car last month when it got a bit warmer.

Offtopic, but does your summerhouse have wired internet access or LTE and if so what speed (down/up) and cost? Just curious.

We use a local provider http://www.trans.net.pl/ and they have some special setup I'm not sure what it's called but I think it's long range wifi and they use a satelite dish as the antenna. The speed is not super great, especially the uplink is to low for us with 1 Mbit/s and we need to stream cctv from there continously, but the downlink is ok with 20 Mbit/s and we pay 56,12 zł which is about $15 per month.

I live in the US, in a small city, and I have DSL. It is $50/mo and downlink is 6Mbps, while upload is 768kbps. That is the fastest available speed.

At home in Sweden I have 250 down 100 up for around $38. I can get 1000/100 for $74 here too but I don't have use for such a huge down link.

Conservationists or environmentalists looking for ways of insect control without pesticides, and it backfires.

It's self-hating human comments like yours that beg for the obvious response: why not start with you. But I don't wish that on anyone. Hummankind are part of nature, not supernatural, so if you love nature you should love humankind, and ergo, yourself.

I should have elaborated on my flippant closing comment, given that several people have referenced it (or, better yet, just not made it-- little good ever comes from flippant comments).

I don't particularly care about conservation. I find the hubris humankind has repeatedly demonstrated to be supremely odious, though. The repeatedly-demonstrated attitude of putting ourselves outside of nature, saying "Oh, but this time our actions won't have unintended consequences...", fills me with white-hot rage.

I recognize that hindsight makes bad decisions seem self-evidently bad. I can't help thinking that some historically bad decisions must have seemed bad at the time, too, yet we made them anyway.

Maybe our evolutionary progeny will be imbued with an intuition that speaks to the complex behavior that arises out of dynamical systems. Maybe they'll innately understand that they're inside the systems they want to influence, and not apart from them. Maybe they'll have sufficiently long lifetimes to skew their thinking away from short term gains. Maybe they won't exhibit the willful ignorance and motivated reasoning that we do. Maybe they'll just be less stupid.

Aside: Your retort of saying, effectively, "kill yourself" followed by "Yeah, but I don't really mean that" does seem a little gauche. I suppose, taken in kind with my flippant statement, it's not so out-of-place, but I do wish that the whole "kill yourself" meme hadn't ever made its way into Internet discourse.

If the last human dies there certainly won’t be anyone left who cares about conservation. So what does that outlook solve?

The feeling of Guilt from complicity in this whole human experiment? Easier to not feel bad about the mistakes people make if there aren't people left to make them?

Imagine what smelly creatures might follow our extinction..!

Asian beetles also bite. I have to spray my house every fall lest they find their way in, which leads me to vacuuming their corpses up every few days the entire winter.

What do you use to spray your house with?

There's the asian ones that are bad for crops and also the box elder bugs. All of them want to overwinter in your house.

From my childhood -and this would be around 1970 - I remember a huge and sudden infestation of ladybugs. For the probably two days it lasted, lawns were tinted red, the air - also out over the water - was visibly red-misted, you couldn't walk anywhere without stepping on the critters, you couldn't quite escape the buzzing and the sound of what sounded like munching, and everywhere was an iron-like smell, some what reminiscent of peas (I can't quite describe it, but to this day the right kind of odour will remind me of ladybugs). And let me tell you: They bite! Walk outside uncovered, they would alight on your skin and start nibbling, not terribly painful, but enough so be unpleasant.

This was Northern Europe. I have seen swarms since then, but nothing remotely compared to that massive outbreak.

I witnessed similar in the mid 90s in NA. My suspicion was the agricultural industry (or it's associated regulatory bodies) unleashed the swarm. Unfortunately for my area, they were the non-native variety and since then, native lady bugs are completely wiped out. Haven't seen one in 2 decades.

There were a lot in the UK in 1976. We had a huge growth in aphids after a warm spring, the ladybirds followed on. I remember seeing a boat at our local reservoir that was covered in them, even the sails, it had turned from white to read.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35603972

Oh yes, the long, hot summer of '76. A glorrious time to be 16 and unexpectedly having the house to myself for several weeks. But no ladybugs to speak of, over here across the North Sea from you. Jellyfish, on the other hand. I remember sailing through shallow waters almost solid with them. Also a one-off, never seen anything like it since then.

Some might say the signs of the end are everywhere lol.

Seriously though, this reminds me of the cicada swarms that hit the south from time to time. Those ARE quite like locusts.

Periodical Cicadas? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas

That looks like them, yes. When they show up they take over. They’re attracted to the buzzing sound of a weedeater, I learned. They come and hang on to your shirt and arms and land on your head. You can’t stop every 30 seconds to swat them off, so you just learn to be friends and coexist.

It’s a biblical experience.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190606020026/https://www.latim...

http://archive.is/tJ2LA

The article didn’t link to the actual radar from @NWSSanDiego, which seems to be this tweet: https://twitter.com/NWSSanDiego/status/1136115889516867586

Could this bring down a plane?

hey ladybugs, get funky

no one got the beastie boys reference?

Regardless of anyone gets the reference or not, that kind of topic that doesn't further the discussion is generally unwelcome on HN and will get you downvotes.

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