Tonya Smith sent me on a non-Easter egg hunt with these picture of a string of barrel shaped eggs laid on a mulberry sapling leaf. A search for insect egg photographs brought out a likely suspect, a leaf-footed bug, Leptoglossus oppositus. A deeper dive found a picture of the critter in action below.
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The name leaf-footed bug comes from the shape of the tibia of many of the Coreidae family. There are 88 species known in North America. L. oppositus is extremely common across the eastern US and I find lots of them in the fields every year along Bull Creek.
L. oppositus is distinguished by the deeper scallops in the leaf-like feature of the hind tibia and the addition of three white spots across the hemelytra, the name of forewings in true bugs.
Proving the identification of the eggs down to species is hard but I would argue that the circumstantial evidence is strong. Red mulberry is one of the host plants of the species as listed in BioOne.
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| Eggs closeup - Tonya Smith |
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| Laying eggs - William Dedo |
