Records of Hemiptera — the true bugs — photographed in and around Tawau, Sabah,
by Wong Fook Yee. This page gathers them from across the Insects/ folders and says
plainly what each record does and does not establish.
In ordinary English "bug" means almost any small crawling animal. On this page it means one thing: an insect of the order Hemiptera. What unites them is the mouth. Instead of jaws, a hemipteran has a rostrum — a beak in which the mandibles and maxillae are drawn out into needle-like stylets sheathed in a grooved labium. Every hemipteran feeds by piercing something and sucking, whether that is plant sap, another insect, or blood. Nothing else in the insects is built quite this way, and it is the one character that holds the order together across animals as different as an aphid, a cicada and a pond skater.
Four suborders are currently recognised: Sternorrhyncha (aphids, scale insects, whiteflies, psyllids), Auchenorrhyncha (cicadas, leafhoppers, treehoppers, planthoppers, froghoppers), Heteroptera (the true bugs in the narrow sense — assassin bugs, shield bugs, water bugs) and Coleorrhyncha (the moss bugs, a small southern-hemisphere group not expected here). More than 80,000 species are described worldwide, ranging from about 1 mm to around 15 cm.
The Insects/ section of this site is filed by wing count — 0_Wing/,
1_pairWing/, 2_pairWings/. That key works well and is kept. But a
taxonomic group does not respect it, and Hemiptera break it more thoroughly than most:
2_pairWings/.0_Wing/.So a single species can generate records in two different folders. Rather than split the group, this index sits above the wing-count folders and reaches down into all of them — the same arrangement already used for the stick insects.
This matters more for bugs than for anything else on the site, so it is worth stating on its own. A wingless hemipteran in a photograph is far more likely to be a nymph than a wingless adult. Most Hemiptera are winged as adults; the wingless ones you actually meet in the forest are usually immature. Nymphs are also the hardest stage to name — colour and pattern often change completely between instars, and most identification keys are written for adults.
The practical consequence: a wingless bug record on this site will usually stop at family or suborder, and often at order. That is the honest answer, not a placeholder.
Something riding on a cicada's eye — Tawau
A sequence of photographs of a minute yellow animal moving over the head and left eye of a resting
cicada, followed from a speck between the eyes to a slow circuit of the eyeball. An original
observation, and an unusually good one. The page is titled "lice" for historical reasons; the
animal is not a louse, and the page now says what it may be instead and what
would settle it.
Cicadas of the Tawau district
Wong's cicada photographs, including an emergence record and a resting individual followed through
a whole day in October 2006. Bukit Gemok and Tawau Hills Park are the two reliable places to watch
cicada emergence in Tawau town. Under revision — see the note below.
Man-faced stink bugs mating —
Pu Zhao Temple garden, Tawau
19 October 2014, 17:04. A pair, mating and motionless, on an Ixora hedge in the garden of
Pu Zhao Temple in Tawau town. Each about 30 mm, bright orange with two bold black blotches, a
metallic blue-black head and a black-and-white banded abdominal border. Recorded as
Catacanthus incarnatus — the first record on this site named
to species, on a pattern that is genuinely diagnostic. The face on its back is
upside down, and its "hair" is the membranous tip of the folded forewings, striped
with their own veins — which makes this record the clearest illustration on the site of the
hemelytron described above. —
iNaturalist observation
397874364
Assassin bug, and what it feels like to be bitten by one
A Reduviidae from Tawau, with a first-hand account of being bitten on the neck and of the
insect's grip. Recorded at family level. A species name previously published on
this page has been withdrawn — it belonged to a New World genus that does not occur in Borneo.
0_Wing/
An ant that is not an ant — Ikutmaju Saw Mill,
Merotai
23 October 2014, 14:02. Open ground in the log yard of a working saw mill about 30 km from Tawau.
About 10 mm, chocolate brown, alone, crawling steadily across a dead leaf. The ant's narrow
waist is painted on — a pale marking at the back of the thorax and another at the front of
the abdomen, reading from above as a gap where there is none. The photographer's field note recorded
"two segments, the head and body", which is the mimicry working on an experienced observer at close
range. Family not determined; probably a nymph. Filed under 0_Wing/ because no
functional wings are visible — the key describes what was seen. —
iNaturalist observation
397964143
0_Wing/
White mealybug on a grass blade —
Tawau River
21 June 2009, 14:04. Grassy scrub on the Tawau River bank opposite Pasar Semarak, about 7 km from
Tawau town. A snow-white, wax-coated insect under 10 mm, alone and motionless on a blade of
lalang, with ants on the same plant. Recorded as Pseudococcidae; genus not
determined, and no photograph of a living mealybug can give one. The larva of the mealybug
destroyer ladybird was considered and ruled out on the arrangement of the wax. —
iNaturalist observation
397184697
Mealybugs are the exception to the nymph caution above. The female is wingless as a nymph and wingless as an adult, so winglessness tells you nothing about her age. Everywhere else in this group it is the first thing to suspect.
Further wingless Hemiptera from the Tawau district — nymphs, aphids and other scale insects —
will be filed in 0_Wing/ and listed here.
Wingless insect with plumed tails —
Sukau, Kinabatangan
10 September 2010, 17:05. On a lichen-covered tree trunk beside a homestay at Sukau, on the
Kinabatangan River in eastern Sabah. About 5 mm, patterned like the bark, with two long tails
banded brown and white and ending in sprays of fine white filaments. No wings. Alone, and mostly
motionless. —
iNaturalist observation
397603301
This record is listed here provisionally, and it may not belong on this page at all. Nothing below class Insecta is established. It is placed with the bugs because a planthopper nymph is the leading candidate — planthopper nymphs are wingless, and they build tails out of the wax they make from surplus plant sugar, feather-like tails among them. But the banding along the tails is not explained by that, and if the determination goes another way the record will be moved. Its page says all of this plainly.
Some of the cicada material on this site was assembled years ago from a Taiwanese reference site and carries Taiwanese species names and Chinese names alongside Bornean photographs. Those names describe the cicada fauna of Taiwan, not of Borneo, and are being removed rather than repeated. Wong's own photographs and his own field observations are the part worth keeping, and are what these pages are being rebuilt around.
All photographs © Wong Fook Yee. Index reviewed: 4 September 2026.