From Scarlet Banksias to Peruvian Bugs

It's been a busy day, and I was going to just post a picture and promise to be back tomorrow, but somehow I've found myself digressing. (I can hear someone close to me murmur "oh really?!", with a suspiciously disrespectful lack of surprise.) Anyway, here's the pic to start with.

Scarlet Banksia, Banksia coccinea, south of Stirling Ranges National Park, Western Australia.

After orchids, the banksias form one of my very favourite plant groups, and this one is especially glorious. The species name comes from the Latin for scarlet - and that's where I got distracted.

It reminded me of the dye cochineal, the name also having the same derivation, and then I remembered seeing the Cochineal Insects Dactylopius coccus, in Peru. The insect is a bug (ie a member of the Order Hemiptera), rather than a beetle as is sometimes asserted. It is a sap-sucking scale insect, always associated with Opuntia spp, the Prickly Pear cactuses. The ones I saw were high up in the Sacred Valley (of the Incas) in the southern Peruvian Andes near Cusco. 

The insects cluster on the cactus pads, and the nymphs cover themselves with a waxy
coating for protection.

So, wherefore the cochineal? The insects are full of carminic acid, which is apparently an effective predator deterrent. And what colour is carminic acid? Well durr, yes it's scarlet...

And there is an Australian connection here. The First Fleet (ie the fleet which carried the first British colonists - mostly convicts and soldiers - to Australia) brought from Brazil Opuntia infested with Cochineal Insects, to make dye for the soldiers' scarlet uniforms! This was not, incidentally, the source of the scourge of Prickly Pear which in the early 20th century smothered tens of thousands of square kilometres of land in southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, so that's a story for another day.

As I'd originally intended to say a few paragraphs earlier - back tomorrow!