I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul. My mandate also includes weird bugs.
-- Calvin
I've never seen a bug like this. I can't even narrow it down to a family, beyond saying that it looks like some sort of Hemipteran ("true bug"). I guess it's more like a stink bug than anything else, but I've never seen anything like that weird enlarged pronotum or the featherlike divisions of the hemelytra.
Its behavior was strange, too. I found about a dozen of these bugs on a hiking trail, and they all started crawling directly towards me. When I moved, they all pivoted in sync and started crawling towards my new location. I don't know if they were attracted to heat, or to tall things that might be trees, or what. At one point, one of them reared up on four legs like a mantis and made paddling motions in the air with its forelimbs.
I've already scoured my field guides in vain for anything remotely similar to this bug. If any readers more entomologically literate than myself can point me in the right direction, it would be much appreciated!
4 comments:
Based on this article:
https://taiwanenglishnews.com/exotic-venom-spurting-stinkbugs-invade-taiwan/
it seems that you were being hunted by an aggressive herd of Tessaratoma papillosa fully intending to poison and kill you.
Watch out, wear a mask and avoid all human contact until Pfizer develops a mandatory antidote.
And according to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessaratomidae#Classification_and_distribution
it was the nymph stage bug going after you. So essentially the insect version of a teenage gang of immigrants. You were lucky to get away alive!
Looks like a stink bug in butterfly clothing.
Well done, Morten! The adult phase of T. papillosa just looks like a normal stink bug, which is why I couldn’t find anything that looked like this in field guides.
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