This photo of a dog with a mouthful of ladybugs is freaking out pet owners

 

The photo that Kansas veterinarian Lindsay Mitchell posted to Facebook looked so unreal and disturbing that some who saw it went right to the hoax-busting website Snopes to verify it.
But that didn’t stop the photo from being shared more than 53,000 times since it went up last week.
Mitchell, of Hoisington, Kan., posted a graphic picture of a dog with a mouthful of Asian lady beetles.
Ladybugs aren’t so cute when 30 to 40 of them are stuck to the roof of a dog’s mouth.
“This is the second pup I have seen like this today. If your pet is drooling or foaming at the mouth look for these lady bugs. They cause ulcers on the tongue and mouth and have a very painful bite,” she wrote on the Hoisington Veterinary Hospital Facebook page.
Mitchell told the Great Bend Tribune that cases like that are rare, so unusual that since she’d never seen anything like it she had to research what was happening.
She wanted to warn pet owners because Asian lady beetles — which can emit a stink and yellow secretion when crushed — are swarming Barton County in unusual numbers right now. Ag experts report that the spread of the sugarcane aphid in areas where milo is grown has drawn the Asian beetles, a major predator of the aphids.
The multicolored beetles have been plentiful in Kansas this year, as they have been in recent years, Jeff Whitworth, a Kansas State University entomology professor, told the Tribune.

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