Black & White Beetle (Korea, 2000)
Hi there WTB…
You were featured as "Bonzer Web Site of the Week" in Randy Cassingham’s "This is True" weekly newsletter last week, and I’m glad you were. Your site’s great! I’ve gone through all your beetle pages and haven’t found this one. I encountered a couple of them near the shrubbery around my apartment building in Kyonggi Province, Korea, in 2000. It’s a great looking beetle, but I haven’t been able to find out what it is. Perhaps you can help. There’s no good reference object for sizing, but I recall they were around 3/4" long.
Regards,
Jim
Gambrills, MD
Hi there Jim,
Though we are not sure what species this is, we can tell you it is not a beetle. This is a Hemipteran, a True Bug. We believe it to be in the Family Pentatomidae, the Shield Bugs or Stink Bugs.
Hi Daniel… Thanks for correcting me. Now that I know it’s a stink bug, I’ve been able to find it on the web. It’s a clown stink bug (poecilocoris lewisi) nymph. Here’s an adult. I never saw any adult clown stink bugs while in Korea, although brown colored ones were very common in the fall. Thanks!
Jim
Update and Link Correction (11/10/2006)
On your stink bugs page , there are two links to animalpicturearchive at the bottom of the “Korean Hemipteran: Clown Stink Bug” entry. One is for a clown stink bug nymph, and the other for an adult. I must say that the picture of the adult is beautiful, and clown stink bugs must have a very interesting life cycle. But the nymph on animalpicturearchive looks nothing like the one in the submitted picture. I think it might even be another species entirely. Fantastic site, either way!
Jess
Hi Jess,
Thanks for having a wonderful sense of humor about this. There is often a problem with our old postings and links because websites often vanish into the ether after several years. Occasionally websites are restructured which resulted in this problem that you have thankfully brought to our attention. The links are now corrected and the Clown Stink Bug, or kwang-dae-no-rhin-jae as it is known in Korea, will be readily identifiable once again.