Paropsis is a genus of Chrysomelidae, commonly referred to as tortoise beetles, which includes over 70 described species. Their small size, bright colours and patterns, and roughly hemispherical shape cause them to be mistaken for beetles in the family Coccinellidae (ladybirds). They are distributed across Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. Some species, Paropsis atomaria in particular, have been introduced to the United States in California with first official documented sightings in 2022. They primarily feed on Eucalyptus but there are a few that feed on Baeckea, Kunzea and Leptosp
Paropsis is a genus of Chrysomelidae, commonly referred to as tortoise beetles, which includes over 70 described species. Their small size, bright colours and patterns, and roughly hemispherical shape cause them to be mistaken for beetles in the family Coccinellidae (ladybirds). They are distributed across Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. Some species, Paropsis atomaria in particular, have been introduced to the United States in California with first official documented sightings in 2022. They primarily feed on Eucalyptus but there are a few that feed on Baeckea, Kunzea and Leptospermum. Species within this genus are noted as pests. For example, Paropsis charybdis is a pest of Eucalyptus in New Zealand.
==Gallery==
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).