Q: Here’s a question that’s different from most of those you receive. What’s your favorite animal?

—Bill in Saginaw, Michigan

You’re right, Bill. I rarely get personal questions (although sometimes I get personal insults!) so thanks for asking. 

My favorite animal is the ladybug, also known as the ladybird or lady beetle. You might find this an odd choice. After all, we humans tend to favor creatures that pay us the most attention, like dogs and cats. We’re partial to coons, coyotes, and foxes because they are almost humanly clever. We even like animals who don’t particularly admire us but exhibit some sort of laudable human trait, like cows who tenderly groom and nourish their infants. To the lizards and toads of the world, all this mammalian carrying on must seem downright bizarre. 

I’m partial to insects out of respect for age. They’ve been around several hundred million years longer than our favorite placental mammals. Not only are they older and arguably more attractive than these mammals, who looked like small, relatively ugly rats, but they were a major food source for the emerging mammals. 

What I love about ladybugs in particular is that unlike many insects, who make contact with us merely to draw blood or administer gratuitous bites or stings, ladybugs seem to enjoy crawling on us just for fun. Besides, as many folks already know, they are a phenomenal enemy of crop-damaging aphids. One ladybug can wipe out 50 of these tiny green monsters in a single day. (I was painfully reminded how beneficial they are just this spring when, for the first time in many years, they didn’t visit my garden. The result: Aphids almost annihilated the Swiss chard. The situation got so desperate that I wrote a poem begging the ladies to return and read it outside, but so far they haven’t arrived. Of course, this negligence could be blamed on the quality of the poem rather than negligence on the part of the ladybugs. 

I’m certainly not the first to venerate the ladybug. She’s considered good luck, even holy, in different cultures. Her English name is derived from the Virgin Mary—“Our Lady” to many Christians—while in Hebrew she’s “Moses’s Cow,” and in Gaelic, “God’s Little Cow.” 

The native nine-spotted ladybug is threatened in the eastern United States, possibly displaced by the imported seven-spotted ladybug. A similar threat to natives of different numbers of spots, ranging from a few to 13, may now be afoot in California. If you want to learn more about the status of some of these species, or get involved in the citizen science of investigating it, check out The Lost Ladybug Project.