A mechanism of color pattern formation in ladybird beetles
Wednesday, September 26, 2018 - 22:00
in Biology & Nature
Many ladybirds have attractive color patterns consisting of black and red. A research team focused on the multicolored Asian ladybird beetle Harmonia axyridis (also known as the harlequin ladybird), which lives mainly in Siberia and East Asia, and shows >200 color patterns within a species. The team has identified a single gene that regulates such highly diverse ladybird color patterns.