Cochineal

• GeneralIt is the source of carmine red dye, still used in food and cosmetics.
• For three centuries carmine was the second most valuable export of Spanish America after silver, and its source was kept as a state secret from rival powers.
• Its cultivation became the main economic driver of the Canary Islands in the nineteenth century, until synthetic dyes destroyed the market within a few decades.
• It produces carminic acid, which serves to repel most invertebrate predators and which, mixed with aluminium salts, yields carmine, the most intense red then known.
• Pre-Columbian cultures used and traded it for at least a thousand years; it was first exported to Europe in 1523 and became one of the most valuable commodities of New Spain.
• Production peaked around 1876, at some 3,000 tonnes a year, and collapsed with the arrival of synthetic aniline dyes. Suspicion of artificial red colourings has brought it back to the market.
• Only the females, which are wingless and soft-bodied, produce the pigment.
• Mexican rearing came close to disappearing in the nineteenth century; today the original genetic diversity is preserved mainly in the hands of smallholders.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Plantations and scrub with prickly pear

Size at birth

Eggs and mobile nymphs (crawlers) under 1 mm, with long filaments that allow dispersal by the wind

Sexual maturity

The female moults twice and is mature after the second moult; the male goes through five instars, develops wings, does not feed and lives only a few days

Gestation / incubation

From egg to breeding adult in about three weeks in warm conditions; full cycles of 64 to 120 days have been described depending on conditions

Litter / clutch size

Several hundred eggs per female, around 300, laid beneath the white wax over several weeks

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Dactylopius coccus · UC IPM, ficha Cochineal scales · Oregon State University, ficha del insecto de la cochinilla · ScienceDirect (Hughes 1989) · Science Advances, How colonial animals evolve · Wikipedia, Zooid · ficha de biologia de Dactylopius coccus

Best time: Visible all year on prickly pear pads (Opuntia) as patches of white wax; crushed, it stains carmine red