#eridians

I'll just go right ahead and say off the bat that Asian Lady Beetles ARE real ladybugs, they're in the ladybug family. They're invasive to North America but so are countless other ladybugs including the seven-spot, which is often compared to the Asian Lady Beetle as the "good", "real ladybug" antithesis. God I hate bad science communication. Don't trust infographics on the internet. Don't even trust me. Do your own research if you're unsure about something.

Anyway, Asian Lady Beetles, as you can see, have a lot of very dramatic colouration. Infographics will often say you can ID them by an M-shape on their thorax, but that's clearly not true. They come in so many variations that they look like different species entirely.

What's the point of all this variation? It's a mixture of things. Now I'm not a geneticist, but I've done research, but still, please take this with a grain of salt.

Humans also express very different physical characteristics between individuals. This ranges from eye colour to hair colour to skin colour, etc. A lot of that can be linked to our habitat. Humans live all over the world, and developed certain traits to better suit those habitats, while still remaining in the same species.

Asian Lady Beetles also live all over the world. However, insects tend to change due to the physical colour of their habitat as well. A famous example of this is the Peppered Moth (Biston betularia) whose population began to be dominated by grey coloured moths instead of white coloured moths as the habitat around them got overtaken by soot from coal powered cities.

So I think it's safe to assume that perhaps a reason the Asian Lady Beetle has so many colour morphs is that it's changed over time to better suit the habitats it lives in. I would be interested to see what the transference of colour morphs are like from parent to child, but I'm about to graduate and don't have time for undergrad research. Maybe I'll do it on my own.

BACK TO ERIDIANS.

The interesting thing with Eridians is that there's no visible light on Erid. The book doesn't mention Eridians being multi-coloured (at least I don't think it does, correct me if I'm wrong), but I still do think that multi-coloured Eridians are realistic.

This is because they're going to detect physical variances by sonar, and their carapace is oxidized minerals, so I'M NO GEOLOGIST (but I have taken geology) but I think it's safe to say that those minerals could have a variety of colours. Not only that but Eridians can sense density and sound permeability. So that could influence colour too.

In an evolutionary sense, they look like rocks. This is obviously advantageous for camouflage, and something we see in Terran animals too. A lot of bivalves blend in well among rocks, and certain arthropods build shells to resemble rocks, sometimes even FROM rocks like in the case of caddisfly larvae.

Summary. Dramatic physical variation exists on Earth as much as it might on Erid. This is probably in response to the global spread of a species, and traits being selected to suit different habitats. Eridians can't see, but different compositions of mineral carapaces likely present with different colours, and lend Eridians an evolutionary advantage in camouflaging across different biomes of the planet. Even without sight, different minerals will have different physical densities, which can be sensed by Eridians and act as identifying features. Size variation probably could occur in that case too.