Who am i!! We are at a garden center near Chicago. Many of our customers have brought these beetles in along with samples of the damage to perennials like cone flowers. The damge done is very close to the virus spread by cucumber beetles! The closet we've come to i.d. is a red type of mexican beetles which could spread a mosaic. Any ideas would be great! Thanks!
This message was edited Jun 6, 2009 8:41 AM
This poor beetle looks very badly distorted - was it emerging from a pupal case? It still looks more like a chrysomelid to me than anything else, but I would like to see an undamaged specimen.
After further review, i now believe that this may not be a beetle after all, but could be a distorted nymph of a four-lined plant bug (Poecilocapsus lineatus) - see http://tinyurl.com/m2kcu4
