By Hunter Hine

Freshman kinesiology major Katy Kuroda was sitting in her Denton Hall dorm room when her roommate came in and told her she had been bitten by a ladybug.

Kuroda’s roommate took her to the front entrance of Denton, where the pair saw ladybugs swarming around the doors.

“There was like, I think maybe a hundred of these ladybug-looking things,” Kuroda said.

The next day they found ladybugs in their own dorm room around the window and lights, Kuroda said.

Kuroda is one of many University of Maryland students finding ladybugs inside their dorm rooms. Michael Raupp, a UMD professor of entomology, said the ladybugs make their way into buildings to escape the cold winter weather, and the ladybug population is especially large because of favorable weather conditions from earlier in the year.

Kuroda and her roommate removed the ladybugs with tissues, but they began seeing them in their hall’s bathroom, Kuroda said. Still, they did not contact the UMD Department of Resident Life or put in a work order, Kuroda said.

Neither did Zainab Balhis, a freshman cell biology and genetics major, who lives in Centreville Hall. Balhis said she didn’t call ResLife because she heard that they were bad at responding to problems.

Balhis tried to remove bugs that entered her room quickly because of her bug phobia, she said. After hitting one bug with a broom, squishing it and drowning it in windex, it still survived in her trash can for two more days before a friend came and captured it, Balhis said.

Balhis said people in her dorm group chat were asking how to get rid of the ladybugs.

“Everyone I know has mentioned encounters with these bugs, from all the other people on my floor and in other floors of the building,” Balhis said.

Balhis posted on Reddit, referring to the ladybugs as “Spicy Ladybugs,” to crowdsource information and tips on removing them.

There has been confusion surrounding the ladybugs, Raupp said. Ladybugs, which are in the beetle family, go by many different names, including lady beetles and lady bird beetles, but the terms are interchangeable, Raupp said.

The ladybugs being found in the dorms, homes and other buildings, belong to the species known as the multicolored Asian lady beetle, Raupp said.

The Asian lady beetles were introduced into the U.S. from Asia. They are considered invasive because of their relatively huge population, Raupp said.

This year brought on uniquely high populations because of abundant rain, mild weather and lots of prey like aphids, Raupp said.

“The numbers are gonna go way up, and then they’re going to be noticed as they try to enter buildings over winter,” he said.

The Asian lady beetle, in more natural settings, seeks out cliff sides and mountains for shelter in the winter, Raupp said.

“They see somebody’s house or a big dormitory, and they say ‘oh there’s the big mountain,’ and they’re trying to get inside to find a winter refuge,” Raupp said.

The Asian lady beetle has become known at UMD for biting people. Raupp said native ladybugs can bite too. The bites only amount to a tickle or a pinch, and a ladybug doesn’t usually try to bite people — unless it feels threatened or is testing to see if you are food, Raupp said.

“They’re not gonna go for the jugular and there’s not gonna be blood loss over these things,” Raupp said. “So this I think got a little bit blown out of proportion, the fact that they will nip you.”

Daniel Gruner, another UMD entomology professor, said the Asian lady beetles have been in Maryland for about 30 years now and — despite all the hype — they are more of a pest than a harm.

While it can’t be said conclusively that the Asian lady beetle is responsible for the lower population of native ladybugs, if they are displacing them, it could be harmful to local biodiversity, Gruner said.

“What’s really much harder to say is whether this introduced species is the cause of the native beetles’ decline,” Gruner said.

Manager of Urban Biology at the Department of Residential Facilities Brian Hain said many bug reports are in Cumberland and Easton. His department also gets reports from Denton, Centreville, Cambridge and, less frequently, from other dorms, Hain said.

“I would definitely encourage students, if they have any bug concerns, to call our service center for work directly. That way we’re getting the best information in the quickest amount of time,” said Kelly Ridings, the senior manager of administrative services at the Department of Residential Facilities.

When ResLife responds to a bug report, they vacuum up live ladybugs, then seal holes or gaps in windows and replace screens with tears, Hain said. The process can take as little as five minutes or as much as a half hour, he said.

“We want to kind of set expectations with the residents that even though we’re doing all these things it’s still possible for them to come through just hopefully at a lesser scale,” Hain said.

The university renovated Cambridge and installed new windows in Easton, but both dorms have high numbers of bug reports, Hain said.

Hain said that the ladybug concerns should soon disappear.

“Thankfully it’s a short-lived phenomenon. Once we get into, really after Thanksgiving, and we’re not having these fluctuations in temperatures, the problem really will go away,” Hain said.