Insects · Coleoptera · Chrysomelidae

Colorado Beetle

Leptinotarsa decemlineata

Not Evaluated

It has not yet been assessed against the IUCN criteria. See full glossary

The Colorado potato beetle — known in Spanish as escarabajo de la patata or dorífora — is a beetle of the family Chrysomelidae with a wide world distribution, associated with places where potatoes are grown and stored, on which it acts as a pest.

Size

up to 1.2 cm

Diet

Herbivore

Feeds mainly on plants.

Activity

Diurnal

Active mainly during the day.

Social structure

Solitary

Lives and hunts alone, joining others only to breed.

Sighting difficulty

Unknown

GrasslandHerbivore Diurnal Solitary Insect Grassland

51countries

Fun facts

It has evolved resistance to more than fifty different insecticides, often within a few years of their introduction; the first case, to DDT, was documented in 1952.
Its enormous fecundity is what allows this: each female leaves such a large genetic pool that selection almost always finds something to act on.
A single adult can eat about 10 cm² of leaf a day, and one individual consumes around 40 cm² over its whole larval stage.
Its range already covers some 16 million km² and is still growing.
It played a decisive part in the birth of the modern pesticide industry: hundreds of compounds were tested against it.

Life cycle & biology

Skeleton type: Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)
Habitat & environment: Potato fields and other nightshade crops across North America, Europe and Asia; it overwinters buried in the soil in diapause
Litter / clutch size: A mated female lays about 25 eggs a day and up to 724 in thirty days

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptinotarsa_decemlineata