Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Colorado potato beetle
Summary
The Colorado potato beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata), also known as the Colorado beetle, the ten-striped spearman, the ten-lined potato beetle, or the potato bug, is a major pest of potato crops. It is about long, with a bright yellow/orange body and five bold brown stripes along the length of each of its elytra. Native to the Rocky Mountains, it spread rapidly in potato crops across America and then Europe from 1859 onwards.
The Colorado potato beetle was first observed in 1811 by Thomas Nuttall and was formally described in 1824 by American entomologist Thomas Say. The beetles were collected in the Rocky Mountains, where they were feeding on the buffalo bur, Solanum rostratum. The genus Leptinotarsa is assigned to the chrysomelid beetle tribe Chrysomelini (in subfamily Chrysomelinae).
Adult beetles typically are in length and in width. They weigh 50-170 mg. The beetles are orange-yellow in colour with 10 characteristic black stripes on their elytra. The specific name decemlineata, meaning 'ten-lined', derives from this feature. Adult beetles may, however, be visually confused with L. juncta, the false potato beetle, which is not an agricultural pest. L. juncta also has alternating black and white strips on its back, but one of the white strips in the center of each wing cover is missing and replaced by a light brown strip.
The orange-pink larvae have a large, 9-segmented abdomen, black head, and prominent spiracles, and may measure up to in length in their final instar stage. The beetle larva has four instar stages. The head remains black throughout these stages, but the pronotum changes colour from black in first- and second-instar larvae to having an orange-brown edge in its third-instar. In fourth-instar larvae, about half the pronotum is coloured light brown. This tribe is characterised within the subfamily by round to oval-shaped convex bodies, which are usually brightly coloured, simple claws which separate at the base, open cavities behind the procoxae, and a variable apical segment of the maxillary palp.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.