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Would girls still let them crawl up their arms if they didn't have the pretty shell and looked like spiders instead? Serious question. Please, no humorous replies.

Though it looked like the San Diego region was about to be drenched in a soggy downpour, it was actually something sort of magical. A giant swarm of ladybugs making its way across the National Weather Service radar had many scratching their heads Wednesday. The cloud of ladybugs, actually called a bloom, was about 80 miles by 80 miles, meteorologist Joe Dandrea told the Los Angeles Times. The bloom wasn't too concentrated, but rather spread out between 5,000 and 9,000 feet, Dandrea told the Times.

Credit: (left) Pbech/Wikimedia Commons; (inset) Dominik Stodulski/Wikimedia Commons The innocuous-looking harlequin ladybird (Harmonia axyridis, shown left) wields a biological weapon of mass destruction. Europe and North America imported the insects in the early 20th century to control pesky aphids. But the harlequin, native to Asia, began to flourish, crowding out the native seven-spotted ladybug (Coccinella septempunctata, shown inset). Scientists previously thought that the harlequin prospered because of an unusually strong antimicrobial immune system, which would protect it from disease in a foreign environment. But the beetle's more potent secret is a fungal parasite, in the insect-afflicting Nosema genus, which...

If a ladybug's life were a horror film, this is how it would start: Scary string music. A close-up of the green-eyed face of a wasp. The sudden pierce of a stinger. The screen goes dark. Next, an establishing shot of our ladybug hero, sitting placidly on a leaf. Suddenly, the sky clouds over. Something orange and grubby begins to poke from the ladybug's abdomen. Audience members cover their eyes, expecting a quick, gruesome end for the black-and-red insect. But it's not that easy. Instead of dying, the ladybug survives as a wasp larva emerges from its abdomen and begins...

Associated Press ITHACA, N.Y. -- The nine-spotted ladybug was considered so common, charismatic and crop-friendly that it was adopted in 1989 as New York's official state insect. As it turns out, the species may have disappeared from the state nearly two decades before that. Recent surveys in New York and the Northeast have found none of the once-ubiquitous beetles entomologists call Coccinella novemnotata-- or C-9, for short. The decline of C-9 and other native ladybugs happened so quickly and precipitously that scientists have launched a nationwide project to try to understand why some species have all but vanished while others...

They bite. They stink. And they want to move in with you. If you hadn't noticed, the multicolored Asian ladybugs that invaded us in 2001 are back. For now, most of them are content warming their backsides on your house's southern exposure. But before the snow flies again, you're going to find them snoozing on the rug in front of your fireplace and reading the newspaper on your coffee table. These bugs aren't the dainty red variety that we honored by naming it our state insect. Those polite little fellas stay outside all winter. Their bully cousins introduced themselves to...

By Will Seccombe It's a bird. It's a plane. No, it's a ladybug. In fact, it's millions of ladybugs swarming all over Ontario. "Why are we being invaded by ladybugs?" "Why are some of them biting us?" "What do they want?" This fall there have been record numbers of ladybugs in Ontario, and these are not the ladybugs people are used to. "They are not red any more," reads a comment on the Great Lakes Gardening Forum. "Their colour is orange. What's happened to our old ladybugs? These new ones are everywhere. A real invasion. Are they coming from...