Even after over three years of poking around the island looking for wildlife, I still find new animals all the time. This little guy was on a bush in the front yard of a house two doors down from my apartment. It’s very tiny, much smaller than a grain of rice. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if it was an animal at all until I took some photos and zoomed in on it. It looks a lot like a leafhopper, but is actually the Asian Citrus Psyllid. As its name implies, it feeds on citrus plants and is originally from Asia. It also carries a disease called Huanglongbing (“Yellow Dragon Disease” in Chinese) that damages citrus trees, although it is not known if they carry this disease in St. Martin (and we don’t have a commercial citrus industry anyway). We do have a lot of Mutton Lemon, which is a close relative to the citrus family that is used as an ornamental shrub here, and is the plant I found this insect on.
