It's time we had a break from mustelids so here is something different. Ladybirds hibernate over winter and many species can be found tucked up on old gravestones. I have only been looking for ladybirds for a couple of years but I am learning where to find them and what to expect. This winter is turning out to be strange.
2024 has been a bad year for many insects - especially moths, butterflies and bees, probably because of the very wet weather in the first half of the year, but it has also been a bad year for ladybirds, with many fewer than expected being reported. I wonder if this might be because there weren't many aphids around for the ladybird larvae to eat.
The North East Ladybird Spot is a citizen science project that has been collecting ladybird records from the vice-counties of County Durham, South Northumberland and North Northumberland since February 2021. It now has getting on for 10,000 records from nearly 200 observers, so is starting to have data worth analysing. Suspecting there might be something odd about this season I compared records for 01 July to 14 November in 2023 and 2024, choosing those dates as a rough approximation of the new generation. The number of records fell by 54%, which was no surprise although there might be several explanations for that. I also looked at records for each of the top 10 species. Nine of them registered falls from -40% for 10-spot Ladybird to -94% for Eyed Ladybird. The one outlier was Orange Ladybird which showed a gain of +153%. Note that the database contains records of occurrence but not abundance so this relates to numbers of reports, not of ladybirds. If all ladybirds were counted the Orange Ladybird would be even more of an outlier.
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