baby ladybugs

I took beatrice for a walk today to the small stretch of park a few blocks from our house that has a couple of rows of cherry trees. I noticed a lot of the leaves had been munched on by something so I took the oppurtunity to look for what might have been munching upon them. I was hoping to find some caterpillars or a cocoon or something. I sort of did.

I spotted this tiny bunch on the underside of a leaf on one of the cherry trees. At first I thought that it was a bunch of aphids eating eggs, until I got home and saw that it was actually a lot of things coming out of the eggs.

You can see that they are pretty tiny and that the are coming out of the white eggs. I am supposing that the yellow ones aren't hatched yet. In the next photo, you can see one of the larvae in the eggs.

I thought that they were pretty neat. I put them in a jar out of the sun and will go back later to get some more leaves for them to eat.

I also found this guy, that I am sure the other little ones will eventually turn into.

This guy is a ladybird beetle (ladybug) larva. They aren't very quick and they can't fly like their adult forms. I put him in a small prescription medicine bottle. He seems to like eating the leaves too. I think I will keep him until his final molt, so I can see what type of ladybird beetle he becomes.

I think that over the summer I will use this blog to keep up on insect studies, since I am not taking any biology courses that term, just chemistry and calculus. I want to put together a field guide to NE portland, since there's a lot of interesting bugs here. I am working on documenting some spittle bugs in our backyard, from larva to adult. One of my neighbors has them all over their lavender. I think what I thought were leafhoppers on the ivy last year were the final instars (stages) of spittle bugs.