I went out to see if there were any ripe tomatoes for my salad tonight and found these red and black bugs all over one of them. The smaller, mostly red ones seem to have spines and be wearing black vests. The bigger ones look like their wearing suits or something. It’s all very creepy. The tomato in the picture is bigger than a ping pong ball but smaller than a tennis ball.
Google pointed me at a few bug identification sites, but I need to know at least what kind of bug it is to reduce the number of pictures to sort through to something manageable.
Any help would be greatly appreciated…
Thanks!
It’s a hemipteran (“true bug”). The big ones are close to being adult, the smaller ones are young ones of the same species.
Could be a member of the family Coreidae.
I saw that same image on bug guide, it’s close but there are a few features missing. Then again, I don’t know squat about bugs so I’m not sure what characteristics to focus on for a good ID. I just scanned through 30+ google image result pages for “heteroptera red” with nothing close enough to satisfy me.
MAN there are a lot of different bugs out there…
Yes, it may be difficult to figure out what it is exactly without keying it out. It looks like you have nymphs there rather than adults since even the largest ones have incompletely developed wings. Coloration may differ between nymphs and adults.
Please forgive my ignorance but what do you mean by “keying it out”?
This is probably the closest image I have seen. What do you think Colibri?
Wow. That bub is seriously cool looking. If I grow some tomatoes, can I have some of my own?
Here is an example of a key to the families of Heteroptera (Hemiptera) of Florida. You make choices between the characters described in each couplet until you arrive at an identification. It does rely on a knowledge of technical terms, however.
That actually looks pretty close. The fact that it feeds on Solanaceae would contribute to the ID as well, since that’s the family that the tomato is in.
Thanks Colibri… you totally ROCK!
