- Author: Mark Bolda
Seeing that I just handled my third call in just a week's time on a weird "lygus sort" of bug appearing in great numbers in some strawberry fields I thought it would be worth a note to share what is going on. The insect does indeed have some lygus like characteristics, including a proboscis, sort of largish eyes, wings folded behind the back, and longer hind legs. However, all cases so far this week have been bigeyed bugs which is important to know since these are beneficial to the farmer and to some extent prey on lygus.
To distinguish bigeyed bugs (Photo 2 below) from lygus bugs (Photo 1 below) it is important to note that with bigeyed bug the eyes are indeed large, but critically the width of the head is even with the body. With lygus it is not even close, and also note that lygus have a small green to yellow triangle on the back. Similar case to the sometimes numerous (and outside of basket contamination, harmless), false chinch bug (Photo 3 below) found in our fields, again the width of the head is not even to the width of the body.
Call me or email anytime, I am more than happy to help you out with this.