Two-spotted lady beetle
From Freepedia
| Two-spotted lady beetle | ||||||||||||||||||||
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| Image:Coccinella bipunctata detail.jpg Adalia bipunctata | ||||||||||||||||||||
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| Adalia bipunctata (Linnaeus, 1758) |
The two-spotted lady beetle (Adalia bipunctata) is a beetle of the family Coccinellidae and is very common in western Europe.
In some populations, the majority of the beetles is female. In these populations, 80-90% of the offspring of a females are female. The cause of this anomaly is the presence of a symbiotic bacteria (e.g. Wolbachia) living within the gametic cells of the female ladybirds. The bacteria is too large to live in the male gametes (sperm). So the bacteria can only be transmitted to the next generation through female gametes. When it ends up in a male, it will die when the male dies. Therefore, it kills most of the male embryos in the newly-laid eggs. These edad embryos then serve as food for their sisters when they emerge from their eggs.
