I was wandering around the property the other day trying to find a long straight stick to turn into a staff. (Because why not?) Didn’t find one, but while I was under one of the big old oak trees, I found a whole swarm of little red bugs. They’re red with black heads, black triangles fore and aft, and block spots on either side of the triangle. From that description, you might think they look very similar to the milkweed bugs that are common across North America, and you’d be right. However, they aren’t. These beasties are actually bugs (true bugs, in the true bug family of insects) called Scantius aegyptius, the Mediterranean red bug.
They were first documented in Laguna Beach back in 2009 by a UC Irvine professor, Peter J. Bryant, but it’s suspected they’d been present before then due to contemporaneous reports from Riverside County. I can attest that they’ve already made their way hundreds of miles north, since there’s a whole heapin’ swarm of them in my back yard on the central coast:
These are true bugs, in the Hemipteran insect order, family Pyrrhocoridae, and they are apparently seed eaters. That’s about all I’ve been able to find out about them so far. They’re red and they’re black, and they don’t seem to attack.
I’ve mentioned it twice already, but third time’s the charm: these are true bugs, which means they suck. Literally. The definition of true bug is an insect with specialized mouth parts for sucking. That means anything in the true bug family can bite / pierce you with stabby mouthbits, so don’t pick them up and check them out without taking precautions.
One thing you might not know about true bugs, as opposed to other insects like butterflies (order Lepidoptera) or dragonflies (order Anisoptera) is that they have “incomplete” metamorphosis. Everyone knows the monarch butterfly life cycle, right? Four stages: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly. Well, true bugs have only three (or maybe two, I’m unclear on the definition): egg, from which the nymph hatches, which grows and sheds exoskeleton until it reaches its final form, the adult, which has wings. Any flying insect is an adult insect.
