CLOSED: What are these?

Besides having a voracious appetite, they have very poor hygiene.

here is one of the few "clean" ones so you can see what they look like unadorned.

Scarlet Lily Beetle larvae. Poor hygiene indeed!!! LOL!
http://bugguide.net/node/view/33225

Uck!!!!They're gross little bugs.

What plant are they on?

oh my, just went to your link ceejay, and I am disturbed to see they fling poo on themselves INTENTIONALLY! Really disgusting bugs. And you know what is odd, I looked at the picture of an adult and have never seen that bug here. But that is for sure what it is and I thank you for the ID. Could have lived without the poo knowledge...HA
Oh, and thought I should add that even though the articles I read said they feed on lily plants, they also obviously like my iochroma.

Thanks again

Gotta say - that plant ID has me way puzzled. I wonder if there is another insect in the family that feeds on Solanaceae....and looks like this. Are there any adults around that you could get a photo of?

No, there were no insects around that plant and I have not seen anything unusual in the bug world around here, besides these. I am out there so much that I really do recognize most of the bugs and when I see a new one and get it id'd I always make sure I find out what it will look like in its different stages. So if I found a new adult, I would make sure I knew what its young looked like and I would have been prepared for these icky things. Also, this plant is in a pot and it was stuck in a group with other plants, an elephant ear/brugs/daphne/hosta and all the leaves of these plants were shoved together and yet they were not on anything except the iochroma.

Ewww, those are gross! I bet they don't have any predators.....even bugs draw the line in grossness!

ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww yucky!!!!

LOLOL, I totally agree with you both, super gross and I can't imagine ANYTHING wanting to eat them! I am still trying to figure out how they get it onto their backs...

I sprayed them with my bottle of soap/rubbing alcohol water and it did kill them.

This has been bothering me. So I did some more research and this makes more sense:
Three-lined potato beetle, Lima daturaphila, is in the same genus, and it also carries its feces around on its back, but it eats plants in the Solanaceae family, which iochroma is in.
http://www.insectimages.org/browse/subimages.cfm?SUB=7488
Please take a look.

Hi Ceejay, looked at your link and it is possible thats them but they look like the first link too. Don't think we can pin it down without seeing the adult and I will make a point of watching. Seems odd they were only on the iochroma when there were three brugs crowded in with it and they were not eating those. After looking at the 2nd link I can tell that mine were not newly hatched because the new hatch in the pics look small and mine were good size and leaves were stripped. So they had plenty of time to move to the brugs and could have easily done so.

Hmm, I am having a brainy moment, not sure it is anything, but the plant they were on was not planted in potting soil, it was in regular clay from the back flowerbed. I had dug it out after thinking it would get too big for the spot and just plopped the whole shovelful into the pot. This was last year, probably end of summer/beginning of fall. The area I dug it out from was under a variegated box elder and occasionally, not often, I see a box elder bug out there. They always feel the need to take a taste and apparently the variegated is different enough that the bugs never stay. But I remember reading they lay their eggs in the soil at the base of the box elder tree so maybe that happened... I googled them but I cannot tell if they have that larvae stage or not. Probably no connection but thought I should mention it.

Boxelder bugs look completely different than this. I know what they look like. The young are called nymphs and resemble the adults in shape.
Maybe these guys didn't go to the brugs because they had plenty of food where they were. And that's where the eggs were laid. If they'd been laid on the brug, that would have been the food plant.

Hi everyone, thought I would put an update. Remember I posted on on the 28th that I had remembered that I dug this plant out of the back flowerbed and just potted it up with the flowerbed dirt? Well, today I was digging a hole right where the poopy bug plant had been, and there were red eggs in the soil. I checked the link that ceejay posted on the 27th for the Scarlet lily beetle and sure enough, they are the eggs I found. So I guess we can ID these as Scarlet lily beetles instead of three lined potato beetle.
Thanks again for all the help.
Donna

And thank you for the update.

I just knew this thread was going to be interesting :-)

PudgyMudpies, take a look at some more pics of the Lema daturaphila ceejaytown suggested:

http://calphotos.berkeley.edu/cgi/img_query?stat=BROWSE&query_src=photos_fauna_sci-Insect&where-lifeform=Insect&where-taxon=Lema+daturaphila&where-ordr=Coleoptera&title_tag=Lema+daturaphila

Note the spelling is Lema daturaphila ( not Lima).

The Scarlet Lily beetle is a recent immigrant to North America, and as far as I know its range is restricted to New England and parts of Canada. I don't think it's possible that they're in California yet.

More beetles in the genus Lema, same family as the Scarlet Lily beetle:

http://bugguide.net/node/view/20934/bgpage