All a Matter of Scale
March 9th, 2008 by Kelley
There is one thing that drives me crazy when it comes to my plants and thats finding stupid scale insects on them. I found the little buggers on one of my ferns today 
As an entomologist, and one with a nice new camera, scale insects aren’t that bad because for one, they don’t move on you when trying to take a photo, and for two, they are actually kind of cool.
They secrete a wax coat for defense. Females don’t have wings and actually keep a lot of their juvenile external morphology (the fancy word for this is neoteny). Males do have wings, but only one pair, which is more like the Diptera (true flies). And males only live for about a day or so, only living long enough to mate.
Interesting, I never pay much attention to scales for some reason. I guess it’s because they’re not usually the arthropod that frantic homeowners are insisting stung their child or supposedly stalks them across the carpet… Thanks for the informational post.