Well, as usual, the friendly folks at bugguide.net were quick on the draw when I needed some help. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, there was more to say about the pearl berry shrub (Vallesia antillana). It seems very attractive to an insect that looks quite like the Florida leaf-footed bug that I’ve posted about elsewhere on this blog. Here’s what that one looks like:
Something was a bit off about it, though (look at the hind legs; in the leaf-footed bug, they are flared, while in the shots below, they are not), so I wanted to get more expert advice to confirm the ID.
Here are a few shots of it:
Within a few hours of my posting the ID request, I got suggestions that this was NOT a leaf-footed bug (family Coreidae) as I’d figured, but rather from the related group Alydidae, the broad-headed bugs. (These two groups are even on the same page in my Kaufman guide, which gives two genera, Alydus and Stenocoris; my NWF field guide lists only Alydus.) And a very short time later, the definitive word was in: this broad-headed bug is Burtinus notatipennis, found from the Southern United States (FL, TX, AZ) to northern South America.
And apparently, at least in my area, it has a penchant for small pearl berry shrubs.
I see several of these guys (as many as five at a time) “roosting” on the plant in the evenings. They’re not there during the day; presumably they’re out there feeding on sap, as their relatives in the genus Alyda do, but somewhere less visible to the passing naturalist snatching time away from a young family…
As I decipher the latin, notatipennis means “marked wing,” presumably for the two prominent marks on the elytra of the insect. But I could be wrong. The species was described in 1859 by a Swedish entomologist named Carl Stål. He was old school, writing in taxonomic Latin: Novae quaedam Fulgorinorum formae speciesque insigniores. Berliner Entomologische Zeitschrift. Berlin 3: 313-327. Yikes!