Looks can be deceiving

I walked past a Beech tree earlier this summer and it looked like it was growing mold.

It had this white fuzzy stuff all up and down the trunk. As I looked closer I saw that there were different kinds of insects all over it too.










This lady beetle was hanging out there. It might not look like much, but these little guys can eat a lot of insects! In fact, when I saw it here I knew that more was going on here than meets the eye. This lady beetle is called the twice-stabbed lady beetle or Chilocorus stigma. They eat a variety of insects like aphids, mealybugs, and scale insects.                                                                                                           

As it turns out, this lady beetle was here because the white fuzzy stuff that I saw was not mold, it was scale insects! These are beech scales (AKA wooly beech scale) and they are not good for the tree. They feed on the sap and if there are enough of them on the tree for a long enough time they will weaken it and make it more susceptible to disease. Hopefully, the lady beetles and other predators that I saw on the tree trunk will help the tree fight off this pest.





When I looked even more closely I saw that the lady beetle wasn't the only predator there.

This is a lacewing larva. If you look closely you can see that this thing that looks like a bundle of debris actually has legs and a head. These larvae put bits of whatever they can find on their backs for camouflage and to protect them from predators. Lacewing larvae are voracious predators themselves.  They eat a variety of insects, as long as they can get their jaws into them.

Their jaws are the two light brown sickle-like appendages sticking out of the front of this one. Once lacewing larvae get their jaws into a prey item, they inject a toxic saliva that kills it and then they suck out the contents like a milkshake!