Science Art: Habitus images of Chimairacoris lakshmiae, 2015.

Scientific illustration of a banyan-dwelling plant bug named for the goddess Lakshmi. The young ones are resplendent in royal blue and crimson.
Scientific illustration of a banyan-dwelling plant bug named for the goddess Lakshmi. The young ones are resplendent in royal blue and crimson.

This is a plant bug. That’s the technical term – it’s part of that group of insects called “true bugs,” the family Miridae; plant bugs are the subfamily Phylinae. This one, Chimairacoris lakshimae, was only identified in 2015, living inside galls – that is, little rounded warts or swellings – on the leaf margins of banyan trees in Bangalore, India. A different bug creates the galls, probably to lay eggs, and then these guys, Chimairacoris lakshmiae, move into the spaces after those guys are done.

The bright, royal blue and crimson ones in that photo are the youngsters. Their coloring, I’m guessing, is why the species is named for Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune and illusion, and the divine wife of Vishnu. Lakshmi isn’t often represented in blue, as far as I know, but Vishnu is.

This image is from “A remarkable new genus and new species of the plant bug (Heteroptera, Miridae, Phylinae), inhabiting psyllid leaf margin roll gall on Indian banyan, Ficus benghalensis,” an excited article from 2015 published in American Museum Novitates, which I found at the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The “Novitates” in the journal name is Latin for “new acquaintances” – all the articles are about new forms and new information.

Banyans are old-looking trees, even when they’re new. But these banyan-dwelling bugs look new, and for now, for science, they are new, too.