An iridescent ball appeared on the kitchen wall:
Despite the silvery shine under LED lighting, it was a Golden Tortoise Beetle:
The iridescence shows up better with a bit of underexposure:
Transparent armor: who’d’a thunk it?
Mary spotted one in the garden some years ago; I’ve never seen such a thing.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
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6 responses to “Golden Tortoise Beetle”
We’ve got these…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianta_arbustorum
…but fortunately a couple of hedgehogs too.
Not something I want to find on the kitchen wall!
Mary does battle with slugs in the garden, to the extent of applying Sluggo (iron phosphate) around seedlings; after the plants take off, they’re on their own.
I’d seen some distinctive golden beetles on morning glory vines. They turned out to be Aspidomorpha tecta (fool’s gold beetle). Their coloring is also not a pigment but an optical effect relying on interference and dichroics, in this case, a structure known as a “chirped stack”.
Mary found a similar critter with a vivid gold iridescence on a squash plant, so maybe that’s what we have, too.
Given that I’ve never seen any before, they must be having an irruption.
They are pretty cool, we found some in the last few summers. I usually find a pseudoscorpions at least once a year too; they just happen to be in our kitchen as well. They are very very tiny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscorpion
“… often observed in rooms with dusty books.” Yes, that would be us: eeeeeek!