Bug o’the Week – Tall Flea Beetle
Sometimes, the BugLady gets a surprise as she’s researching an insect, and that was the case this week.
She saw a cluster of these pretty beetles when she was on a boardwalk in a wetland. Their pedigree? They are leaf beetles in the huge family Chrysomelidae; within that family, they’re in the tribe Alticini – the flea beetles, and they are (probably) Disonycha procera (Disonycha means “double-clawed”). There are 470 members of that tribe in North America, and more elsewhere. Only one source gave it a common name, but there was no explanation why this small insect might be called the Tall flea beetle.