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Chrysolina herbacea - Dorsal
Quite hard to distinguish from some other Chrysolina species, such as graminis, fastuosa and especially coerulans. The latter normally being blue and herbacea green, but exceptional green coerulans and blue herbacea do exist(!) Always best to check male genitalia. This one is from a population in arboretum Poortbulten near De Lutte, Netherlands where it coexists on Mentha aquatica together with Ch. coerulans and Ch. polita. At the time it was the most northern population in the Netherlands and it may very well still be.
Other images here:
''Chrysolina herbacea'', also known as the Mint Leaf Beetle, is a species of beetle in the family Chrysomelidae.
Similar species: Beetles
By Pudding4brains
Public Domain
Uploaded Nov 21, 2017. Captured in Lossersestraat 71, 7587 PW De Lutte, Netherlands.
comments (5)
The pronotal grooves are deeper than that the image by Jivko (and others) which are almost absent.
Do you think this is natural variation within the species? Posted 7 years ago
There is always some variability in that kind of characters but I do suspect my images currently are the only Ch.herbacea on the site ;o) I checked the male genitals of the population mentioned above as it was an unexpected new loaction for the species.
Looks to me like Jivko mostly has graminis, partly uploaded as fastuosa and partly as herbacea, but at least for me these are notoriously iffy to ID with certainty from photo, so I have commented but not changed the ID yet. The herbacea from Greece (by Stuart) I'm not sure about either - might well be Gastrophysa, but I feel the antennae may be too thin for that, so also a bit inconclusive. I plan to ask Jaap Winkelman next. He is one of our (inter)national experts on the Chrysomelinae and I'm currently in the process of adding texts from one of his books to the species info on waarneming.nl so we'll have more to discuss anyway :o) Posted 7 years ago
Posted 7 years ago