Animal · United Kingdom, France, Germany
Seven-spot ladybird
Coccinella septempunctata — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The seven-spot ladybird is a small red beetle with three black dots on each wing case and a seventh spot sitting right where they meet. The number of spots tells you the species, never the age of the beetle.
Picture credit: Luc Viatour (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Darius Baužys (CC BY 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the seven-spot ladybird live?
Home: meadows, gardens and field edges full of aphids.
In the wild it lives in these countries: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Poland, China.
The short profile
Fully grown: 6.5–7.8 mm, about the size of a pea. It weighs about 0 kilograms. On the menu: insects.
The story behind it
A ladybird's favourite food is aphids, and a single beetle can eat dozens of them in one day, which is why gardeners are glad to see it arrive. Its larva looks nothing like the adult: dark grey with orange marks, a bit like a tiny crocodile, and it hunts aphids even more greedily. From egg to beetle takes about six weeks, and the red colour only appears a few hours after the beetle has left its pupa. Red with black dots is a warning sign, and if a bird still tries, a drop of bitter yellow fluid appears at the ladybird's knees. In autumn thousands of them creep into cracks, leaf litter and window frames, huddle together and wait out the cold. The species comes from Europe, Asia and North Africa and was carried to North America on purpose to fight aphids, where it has been living wild since the 1970s.
Find it on the globe
Seven-spot ladybird is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How big is a seven-spot ladybird and how do I recognise it?
It is 6.5 to 7.8 millimetres long, roughly a pea, and weighs about as much as a single grain of rice. Count the dots: three on each red wing case and one across the seam, plus two small white patches on the black head shield.
Where do seven-spot ladybirds live?
Wherever aphids grow: meadows, nettle patches, gardens, hedges and field margins all across Europe, North Africa and much of Asia. Since the 1970s they have also lived wild in North America, where people released them to protect crops.
Do the spots show how old a ladybird is?
No, that is a very popular mistake. A ladybird gets its spots once, in the hours after it leaves the pupa, and never adds another one; the number simply belongs to the species, so a seven-spot has seven all its life. Other kinds carry two, ten, twenty-two spots or none at all, whatever their age.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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