Brown Shield Bug
S5, Adult, Female, dorsal
Brown Shield Bug
S5, Adult, Female, profile
| Brown Shield Bug S5, Adult, Female, dorsal | | Brown Shield Bug S5, Adult, Female, profile | | ||
 | Class: | Animals (Animalia) - Jointed Legs (Arthropoda) - Insects (Insecta) | |||
| Order: | True Bugs (Hemiptera) | ||||
| Family: | Stink Bug (Pentatomoidea, Pentatomidae) iNaturalist Observation | ||||
| Species: | Brown Shield Bug (Poecilometis fuscescens) | ||||
| This Photo: | 🔍S11, Adult, Female, dorsal🔎 | ||||
Thank you Mike Burrell for confirming the id of this species for us General Species Information: Found on Ellura (in the Murray Mallee, SA) and elsewhere ~17mm long. When identifiying Poecilometis, leg colour, antennae colour & segments, body colour and shoulder spines (or not) are all useful diagnostics. They can have different shades of colour, but generally the patterns are consistent. Notice here the spiny shoulders, pattern of beige blotches on the dark reddish base colour. Legs have pale sections and the antennae generally have orange on one side of the segment joins but not the other. Here we have been able to separate the genders of some of our specimens where we have managed a ventral shot. You can see the shape of the rear end is quite different between the one male we found, to all the other females. Interestingly, we've deduced that you can differentiate the genders by counting the abdominal spines from above. Males have 4 visible pairs, females have 5. On the male, the spines on the 5 segment exist, but are narrower than the wings. You need a 90 angle shot to see this. In too much of a profile angle, all 5 are visible. We have found Poecilometis with different antennal segment counts on the specimen, so these can't be relied on completely. NB: Here, S3, clearly has it's right-hand antennae tip truncated, it's a blunt end. So not useful for an antennal segment count. | |||||
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