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Sticker of American five-spotted lady beetle
Bug card No. 0079 of 4,939

American five-spotted lady beetle

Hippodamia quinquesignata

The American five-spotted lady beetle is a ladybird from North America. Its colours and spots change a lot from one beetle to the next. Some of them even have no spots at all, even though they are called five-spotted.

Lives in
North America, from Alaska and Canada south to California and New Mexico
Length
4 to 7 mm (0.16 to 0.28 in)
Top speed
about 32 km/h (20 mph)
Flying, estimate
Can it hurt you?
Harmless
Harmless. It does not sting and is a friend of gardeners.
What does it eat?
Like its ladybird cousins, it eats aphids and other tiny soft insects.
For real!Photo of American five-spotted lady beetle
Picture by iNaturalist user: dominic. CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How big is it?

How long is it?

American five-spotted lady beetle about 7 mm long (0.28 in)A grain of rice about 6 mm (0.24 in)A toy building brick about 3.2 cm (1.3 in)
small enough to sit on your fingernailcould fly across a whole football pitch in 12 secondsmoves 1300 times its own body length every second

How big is American five-spotted lady beetle compared to YOU?

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How fast is it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

1

The pattern on its wing cases is extremely variable, so two of them can look quite different.

2

There are two kinds of it. One kind, from the west coast, is usually spotless.

3

It lives all the way from Prince Edward Island in the east to Alaska in the far north.

you asked

Most asked questions about American five-spotted lady beetle

?How big is the five-spotted lady beetle?

About 4 to 7 millimetres long.

?Does the five-spotted lady beetle always have five spots?

No. Its pattern changes a lot, and one kind of it usually has no spots at all.

For bug experts

Scientific name
Hippodamia quinquesignata
Named by
Kirby, 1837
Group
Ladybirds
Family
Coccinellidae
Classification
Insecta > Coleoptera > Coccinellidae
Lives on
North America
Also known as
Five-spotted lady beetle

Where the facts come from

  1. Hippodamia quinquesignata (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
  2. Picture by iNaturalist user: dominic. CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.

If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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