We all like ladybirds. They are the colourful beetles that we sometimes see in the garden or in the park. They don’t bite or sting, they do a good job by eating the little insects who attack our garden flowers and are even quite friendly - allowing us to pick them up, if we are gentle, and then unfolding their wings and flying away when they have had enough of the attention.

You probably know already that there are different kinds of ladybirds. Most are red and black, but some are yellow and black, some are orange and black , some are white and black and some are black with red spots. They also have different numbers of spots on their backs. Some have two spots, some have five spots, some have seven spots, some have eleven, and so on all the way to twenty-four spots. It isn’t true that a ladybird gets more spots as it gets older - they stay the same number all through it’s adult life. All in all there are 47 different kinds of ladybird in Britain!

The photo at the top of this blog post is a seven-spot ladybird that I found on one of my apple tree’s in my back garden. It was sitting on that leaf when I found it. The seven-spot is one of the most common types of ladybird in Britain. Sadly this year I’ve only seen two so far in my garden, and it may have been the same one twice!

Where do ladybirds come from? Are there baby ladybirds? Well, yes! But they don’t look quite like the grown-up ones. Here is a photo of a baby ladybird I photographed earlier this summer:

Do you remember the famous story about the Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle? A ladybird also starts out in life as a little egg on a leaf and then, instead of hatching out as a hungry caterpillar, it hatches out as a hungry baby ladybird. Baby insects of many kinds, not just ladybirds, are called larvae, so we will use that word too. Ladybird larvae hatch out in late spring or early summer and eat the same little insects that the grown up ladybirds eat. A few weeks later, after a whole lot of munching, they make a house for themselves, just like the hungry caterpillar does, called a pupa. They stay covered up in this special house for about a week and then come out as a beautiful grown up ladybird. Here is a photo of two pupae (the word is different for more than one pupa) sharing the same stinging nettle leaf:

At the time I am writing this post, at the end of August, most of the adults will have emerged by now but you might still be able to see the pupae houses that they left behind if you look around carefully. The really interesting thing about ladybird pupae is that every different type of ladybird has its own style and colour of pupa. There are lots more pictures of ladybirds, nymphs and pupae that I have taken this summer on my tumblr photo stream so be sure to have a look there if you want to see more photos.

If you want to learn more about the different kinds of ladybirds you might be able to find in your garden or in the park then I would recommend two fold out poster guides by the Field Studies Council; Guide to Ladybirds of the British Isles and Guide to the Ladybird Larvae of the British Isles. They are small enough that you could take them to the park to help you recognise different kids of ladybird or you could put them up on your wall at home. If you are really really interested in knowing more about ladybirds then I would have a look at the UK Ladybird Survey website - it has lots more stuff about the ladybirds that live in our country.

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Catching Up With A Comet

Photo by ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

Ten years ago the European Space Agency launched a rocket into the sky. It whizzed around the sun a few times, speeding up as it went, and then around a few planets, including the Earth three times, on a cleverly planned path to hit a very small target a long way away. Clever is not really a big enough word - you try throwing something at target so far away that it won’t hit it until ten years later! The spacecraft at the top of this rocket is called Rosetta.

At the beginning of this month, August 2014, Rosetta reached its target, a comet speeding its way towards our Sun that at the moment is somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This comet has the rather long and difficult name of 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, because of the two people who discovered it. For the sake of the rest of this blog post, and mostly because I can’t pronounce it properly, let’s just call it comet 67/P. Here is a map of Rosetta’s journey:

Source: ESA

Comets are big dirty snowballs of ice and rock that sometimes come from very far out in space and loop around the sun. We think there are countless numbers of them surrounding our solar system in a dark region of space far away from the light of our star called the Oort Cloud, where they have been for a very long time not doing very much. Comets are different from asteroids - asteroids are made mostly of rock and are only found inside our solar system. Sometimes something, maybe a bump with a neighbour, causes a comet to fall in towards the Sun from the Oort cloud and it begins a long journey slowly picking up speed - it can take millions of years until it reaches the inner solar system. Three or four of these long-period comets fall in towards us like this each year. When they arrive they sometimes loop around the Sun and whizz off again never to return, sometimes they get too close and burn up and sometimes they get ‘captured’ by the Sun’s gravity and start to make much smaller circles inside the solar system where we can see them buzzing past us at regular intervals thereafter - we call these ones short-period comets.

This comet, 67/P, is a short-period comet that goes around the Sun every six and a half years or so and is about 3 kilometres by 5 kilometres in size. Since it was discovered it has been around the sun seven times. It isn’t a perfect sphere as you might imagine it should be. Far from it, as you can see from the photo at the beginning of this post, it is an odd shape.

Of course you already know that comets are things that sometimes are bright enough to be seen in the night sky and they have long tails behind them. So where is the tail on this one? The tails are caused when comets get closer to the sun and some of the ice begins to melt. Comet 67/P is on its way toward the sun right now and it is going to be Rosetta’s job to follow it closely for the next 18 months and watch what happens to it as it starts to melt and its tail begins to grow. In fact it is already starting to melt as this next photo shows:

Photo by ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

Unfortunately, like most comets, 67/P isn’t close enough or big enough to be so bright that we can see it from Earth with our own eyes, although it can be seen with a telescope. But you don’t need a telescope. The cameras on Rosetta are sending back the most incredible pictures we have ever seen of a comet close up.

This event is important because this is the closest we have ever been to a comet before. The Rosetta spacecraft is less than 100 kilometres from the comet right now and soon will be about 30 kilometres away. In November, it is going to launch a small landing craft, called Philae, onto the surface of the comet. We’ve never tried anything like this before. We’ve seen plenty of comets in telescopes but have never touched one until now.

Knowing more about comets is important because we think they are very old - as old as our Sun and the planets spinning around it. Learning more about comets may mean we learn more about how our solar system was created 4500 million years ago. When Rosetta finds out some more interesting things I’ll let you know.

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These past few weeks you might have seen some tall-ish green plants with bright yellow flowers at the top. They grow in fields and rough ground all through the summer and one place you can find them a lot is by the sides of roads. This plant is called ragwort. Sometimes ragwort has stripey yellow caterpillars on it. This summer I have noticed lots of ragwort and lots of caterpillars. Maybe like you, I had no idea what these were called. It turns out they are called Cinnabar Moth Caterpillars and they are rather special.

Normally small animals want to be colours that help them hide in the places that they live. Yellow and black is a funny colour if you want to hide on green plant stems and leaves; its a very loud colour mix that can be seen easily! Do you know of other animals that are yellow and black striped? Bees and wasps are too and, as every small boy and girl knows, these insects are dangerous and have nasty stings. They don’t need to hide - their stripes are a warning to other animals. The stripey caterpillar is saying the same thing to other creatures, particularly to small birds who might want to eat it as a tasty snack. It is saying “Watch out, you might not like the taste of me!” and they are right - because the caterpillars don’t taste nice and are poisonous to things who eat them.

Here is the really clever bit; how do these little caterpillars become poisonous? They are not born that way. They eat the leaves of a poisonous plant and become poisonous themselves. Which plant? Ragwort! Ragwort tastes bad and is poisonous to animals who try to eat it, even big animals like horses, so obviously don’t try that yourself, but it is not poisonous to Cinnabar Moth caterpillars and I suppose that they must like the taste of it because they eat a lot of it - many ragwort plants I have seen these past few days have had all the leaves chomped off!

Just as in the story everybody knows, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, eventually these stripey caterpillars make a cocoon for themselves and then turn into a beautiful butterfly. Well not a butterfly actually in this case but a moth. A Cinnabar Moth is a moth that flies in the daytime, unlike most moths who fly at night time, and it also looks a lot more pretty than most moths do. It is poisonous too, which is why it is not worried about having a beautiful bright red colour on it. Here is a picture of what one looks like, but I didn’t take it:

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons | Taken by Svdmolen

In the next few weeks there should be a lot less caterpillars and a lot more moths so maybe I will find some and take a photo of one myself to show you. In the meantime have a look and see if you can find any ragwort, caterpillars or moths like these where you live.

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