Bean Plataspid

Plataspidae; Plataspinae; Plataspini; Megacopta cribraria (Fabricius, 1798). This Bean Plataspid has long been one of my favourite insects. It appears regularly, every dry season, and visits our Hyacinth Beans. Although I am always happy to see this bug, it has been a bit of a roller coaster ride. For several years, I was convinced that this was Megacopta cribraria, but could not support that identification because I could never find confirmation of its presence in the Philippines. Then I was kindly given some help by another Project Noah member, I was pointed in the direction of a specimen in the Swedish Museum of Natural History. It had been collected, in the Philippines, by Stal (in 1871). Stal named it Coptosoma obtusiceps. There were pictures which look great, considering that the specimen has been dead for 150 years. So, I was convinced and happily went through my spottings, correcting the scientific name and any other conflicting text. It felt good to have finally got it right. That was in April, 2022. Since then, whenever I have spotted a new Coptosoma obtusiceps, I posted another spotting. Right now, I am not sure how many spottings I have, with the identification C. obtusiceps and there is a problem again.. A site which I consider to be very reliable, gbif.org,. is now confirming the presence of Megacopta cribraria in the Philippines and numerous other countries where it had never been mentioned before. No site (other than the Swedish Museum of Natural History, has ever mentioned the Stal specimen. It doesn't even appear as a synonym. So, I have returned to my old favourite M. cribraria for this spotting and, over the coming days, I will be doing quite a bit of editing on my older spottings.