Appearance
This bug is elongated in shape with an M-shaped mark at the wing-cover bases. The female is about 7 millimeters long and the male is about 6 millimeters. The adult can fly, but each flight is just a jump of a few meters at most, and the gravid female tends not to fly. The adult and juvenile produce a noxious scent when disturbed.Naming
This species was formerly treated as synonymous with ''Ischnodemus oblongus''.Reproduction
The female lays masses of up to 38 eggs each, with an average of 12. The egg is about 3 millimeters long and white when freshly laid, turning red in time. The egg mass is usually deposited near the attachment of the leaf sheath to the stem of a plant.The eggs hatch in about 12 days. The newly emerged nymph is about 1.5 millimeters long. There are five instars. The new nymphs remain in a group near their eggs, and later hide under the leaf sheaths. There they suck sap from the plant tissues. By the fifth instar stage, many nymphs have dispersed and become solitary. The fifth-instar nymph is about 5.5 millimeters long. Nymphal development takes about 29 days.
Predators
Among the natural enemies of the bug are a scelionid wasp of the genus ''Eumicrosoma'', which is an egg parasitoid, and the entomopathogenic fungus ''Beauveria bassiana''.References:
Some text fragments are auto parsed from Wikipedia.
