Beetles

Beetle Parade

It continues to astound me that I can find insect species that are new to me nearly every time I look, and it’s been three or more years that I’ve been looking, often every day. I was excited to find three gorgeous beetles this week.

The first photo is definitively a leaf beetle, but after that I may be stalled… because I don’t know my plants. Beetle species are wildly abundant and often there’s a type of beetle associated with dozens of host plants. That’s the case with these Galerucini tribe leaf eaters. I know exactly where the plant is, though, so maybe I can find a floral expert sometime to help me identify the plant and, therefore, the insect.

This attractive long-horn beetle was right across the path from the leaf beetle. It’s a Pidonia scripta and it’s on Thimbleberry… I know this because iNaturalist recognizes the flower. There were at least a half dozen of these beetles, one per flower, on a small stretch of path. They tended to crawl under the flower when I got near, but I had several chances to be stealthy.

I was excited to spot this May beetle (aka June bug and a lot of other nicknames). These branched-antennaed beetles usually fly at night, so I was even more happy to find another one two days later. In fact, I saw all three of the beetles in today’s post on both visits, which feels crazy rare to me. The first two were on their host plants, but I’m not sure what this May beetle was doing. I did learn it’s in the Dichelonyx genus and they fly during the day. It’s the subject of my Mt. Pisgah column this week, so you can read more there.

Cheers!

A Change in Plans

Last week I went back to a high-desert camp I’d been to about a year ago. I was excited to look for a couple of interesting beetles I’d found there last summer, and get better pictures of them if possible.

As it turned out, I didn’t see either insect this year. So the photos above remain the best images I have of a tiger beetle and a ten-lined June beetle.

However, because of the “failure,” the trip yielded a few thoughts.

I recently visited Christopher Marshall, the curator of Oregon State University’s arthropod collection. He said,

“Surveys and people looking for new material have a way of self- reinforcing their own biases so once you know a certain taxon lives somewhere and you can see that in a collection or a publication, you’re likely to go there again to see it or collect more of it.”

He said OSU recently helped the University of Michigan with a study on a rare butterfly. Marshall said people who came from outside Michigan found the butterfly in areas the locals hadn’t found it—because the locals always went to places they’d seen it before.

So here I was, going back to a place and expecting to see the same species I’d found there before. Silly human. The good thing was, by not seeing those two beetles, I focused on some other insects that were new to me. One was a spotted pine sawyer beetle.

This guy (pretty sure it’s a guy because the female’s antennae are shorter), isn’t destructive: They lay eggs only in dead or dying pines. It’s an impressive insect, about 1.5 inches long in the body with antennae that more than match it. Up close, the white spots sparkle with colorful iridescence.

I also got some decent shots of this creature. It flew like a dragonfly, and I couldn’t figure out what it was at the time. Turns out, it’s a robber fly. They are fierce predators and eat everything from grasshoppers to stinging wasps. The fuzz around the face is called a ‘mystax,’ from the Greek word for moustache, and it may help protect them from thrashing prey.

So the trip was productive, insect-wise, but not in ways I’d anticipated. I guess that’s the definition of being in the moment: Your goals need to be firm enough that you’re pointed in a specific direction, but not so rigid that you miss out on the unexpected, or can’t tolerate changes in circumstance.

Action: ADAPT. When things don’t go as planned, find ways to remain true to your goal. Note: “adapt” also applies to biodiversity. Insects will relocate and change their seasonal schedules to parallel changes made by the weather, the timing of blooming plants, and / or their prey.

You Have to Choose

After failing to find any pictures on Google images that look like a beetle I found the other day (pictured), I checked out a bunch of books from the library. One, Insects of the Pacific Northwest, I thought would be helpful not just for this species, but to learn about many of the insects I’ve seen so far.

I flipped through it with anticipation. There are more than 12 pages of longhorn beetles, several of which I’ve seen and many that I’d love to see. But none of them look like this beetle, which I’m pretty darn sure is a longhorn beetle.

I re-read the introduction. Turns out, it’s not a guide to all the insects in the Pacific Northwest. The authors chose 452 species of the more than 28,000 species in the region. Duh. For all my wonder at the diversity of insects, I should have known that!

The guidebook incident brings up some things I never thought about. When someone writes a guide to the natural world, they curate what to include. Maybe it’s obvious, but I guess I’d thought that, like a dictionary, you’d write something about everything that was known. The problem is, especially with insects, but I’m sure it’s also true for birds or flowers, there are so many thousands of varieties that you can’t provide pictures or words about all of them. You have to choose.

And that’s powerful and intriguing. Say you get to write a guidebook for people about your city. Of course, you’d pick the experiences and restaurants that you enjoy and recommend those things for your readers. Your guidebook would be completely different from your neighbor’s or your co-worker’s.

It’s the same with a guide to plants or animals. The authors have the privilege and responsibility to choose how to narrow the enormous list of possible entries. Somehow I “get” that idea for a guide to a place. But it never occurred to me that a guide to living things would have a bias, a slant toward the preferences of the author(s).

In the case of Insects of the Pacific Northwest, the author discloses in the introduction that he chose insects that people most often asked to be identified, in his experience at an Agricultural Commission office. He further limited the list to larger, more common and more easily identified creatures. He chose to exclude mosquitoes, mayflies and ants. He adds seven pages of insect galls, which are the growths on plants that are a result of insect larvae deposits. An odd choice, but one he saw was missing from other guidebooks and that, I’m sure, is a personal interest.

Action: CHALLENGE yourself to find an insect that’s not in a guidebook. You’ll have to have an insect identification book first. They’re easy to find in libraries or used book stores. Then, take pictures and keep notes about creatures and look them up. See how many you can find that aren’t in the book.

Pest Peeves

I found these colorful beetles on some flowers in the back yard. “Pretty!” I thought, “they must be related to ladybugs!”

Well, I looked them up and learned they’re Anthrenus verbasci, aka carpet beetles. They’re considered a pest, and all of the articles about them are about how to kill them. I have several issues with this.

First, it’s the larvae of the beetle that cause damage to animal-based fibers like wool, silk, and leather. The beetles in the image are completely innocent adults who only eat pollen. The larvae (which can live two years) are known as “woolly bears” because they’re covered in brown hairs. Yes, they damage some things that some humans invest with value. But.

Here’s my second point: Insects are not inherently evil. They don’t conspire to tick you off. Often (perhaps usually?), the reason an insect is a problem is because humans did something to unbalance nature. Case in point: When humans decided to make clothes out of wool or silk, populations of insects who had for eons fed on that food boomed. Nature always enforces a balance: Insects can’t destroy too much of their food source or they won’t survive. We just make it easier for more of them to thrive when we increase their food supply or concentrate it as it never was naturally.

Certainly, there isn’t a shortage of carpet beetles. Killing the ones inside your house probably won’t dent their population. However, there are many examples of tragic unintended consequences. Insecticides hurt insects, animals and plants other than the targeted ones. People should think before reaching for the poison.

Action: UNDERSTAND. Before you get out the insecticide, get your head around what your goal is and think through the best way to achieve it for your own health, and that of your pets, children and yes, the insects.

Fatal Attraction?

Two years into my insect infatuation, I realize I’ve fallen into a trap that was one of the reasons I started studying invertebrates in the first place. I’ve been more drawn to flashy, bizarre and storied insects and ignoring smaller, single-colored average-looking species.

We care more about attractive things. It’s hard-wired in some cases. The large-featured faces of babies, kittens and puppies are universally appealing for a reason. That instinct backfires when we’re more inclined to save a colorful rare bird or mammal and care less about dull-looking plants and animals … or tiny creepy crawlies. By focusing on only the more attractive creepy crawlies, I’m forwarding that same bias. Perhaps the ho-hum black beetle that researchers and entomologists aren’t drawn to studying has more to teach us than the flashiest iridescent one. At the very least, they should be treated equally.

Action: RETHINK. Think of something you consider dull or uninteresting (baseball? opera? coin collecting?) Take 15 minutes to look into that topic. Read just a little more about the subject than you ever have. Research until you find one or two things that make you say “wow!” Chances are, it won’t take that long. And maybe you’ll understand your avid birdwatching uncle or ping-pong crazed co-worker a bit better.

P.S. The beetle above is the female dimorphic longhorn beetle. The black beetle at the top of the article is the male.

All in the Family (or not)

Here are three beetles I’ve seen in the past month. They’re all black and yellow and about the same size. They live in the same part of the United States. They look related, right? Like cousins, maybe even in-laws.

But.

(Sing to the Sesame Street tune if you remember it) … None of these things are much like each other.

They’re all unique species. They can’t breed with each other. They can’t survive on one another’s food or grow up in another one’s specific habitat. In addition, they’re all in a different genus, and one is in a different family than the other two (and it’s not the two you think!).

Families, in scientific classification, are a pretty wide category. Humans, for example, are in the same family, hominidae, as other great apes, like gorillas and orangutans. The ornate checkered beetle (#1) and the banded yellow longhorn (#2) are in different families. They’re as different from each other as we are from lemurs, a species outside our family, but in our order (primates). The two beetles that are most alike (#2 and #3) are both longhorn beetles in the cerambycidae family, and are related like we are to gorillas.

Action: EXAMINE. Look closely at insects. What you might shoo away thinking it’s a bee could easily be a fly or a beetle. You might find a rare insect, or one with an amazing life story.

Fun bonus fact: The ornate checkered beetle parasitizes bees! Its larvae attach themselves to solitary bees such as mason bees, accompany them back to their nests, and feed on bee eggs and larva as they morph into adults.

Looking at the Edge of the Internet

I’ve noticed since I drew an alphabet of prehistoric and extinct animals in 2017 that, sometimes, the internet isn’t the definitive source we think it is. Often, I’d research an animal only to find that scholarly papers on that creature hadn’t been uploaded, either because the writing was too old and obscure to have been scanned or, on the flip side, because it was too new and proprietary.

Incredibly, and happily to my mind, there are also some topics that have never been explored, period. There are over 350,000 species of beetle. I’m sure there haven’t been 350,000 entomologists over time to study each of them (even if each specialist chose an uncharted species).

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I ran up to the edge of the internet. I found a beautiful beetle yesterday (I netted it thinking it was a bee) and took several great pictures of it. Yet when I went to learn more about my new friend, I faced an abyss, a vast emptiness of information.

All I found was its scientific name (cosmosalia chrysocoma), its common name, Yellow Velvet Longhorned Beetle, and that it was first described in 1837 by a guy named Kirby. And that was about it.*

I’ve been reading Diary of a Citizen Scientist by Sharman Apt Russell. She was inspired by Dick Vane-Wright, the Keeper of Entomology at the London Museum of Natural History, who said, “There’s so much we don’t know!… You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. Our ignorance is profound.”

I love this. I figure, I could go back out to the woods where I saw the Yellow Velvet beetle, study it for a while, and add something to the world’s knowledge. That’s an awesome thing. It gives me hope and makes me feel that every minute I spend outside being aware is full of potential, a universe of possibility. Moments like this renew in me the wonders of childhood, when we knew we didn’t know everything and therefore, even magic and fantastical things are entirely plausible.

Action: PIONEER. You can try to find the end of the internet too! Whether you’re sitting on your deck or walking in a nature preserve, take notes or take a picture of what you notice and find interesting, and see what you can learn about it when you’re next at a computer.

*Here are a couple of links to Yellow Velvet Long-horned Beetle pages. From the foothills of the Olympics in Washington and a blogger named Sally, who also found one on cow parsnip (where I caught mine). We might assume it bores into trees to lay eggs, like other longhorns. But that and other generalities are speculation, as far as I can see, having looked into the four available pages of internet search results.

Also, don’t confuse this innocuous insect with the velvet long-horned beetle which, apparently causes trouble as an ‘invasive species’ (I’ll comment more on that term later).

A Tale of Two Beetles

It’s been shorts and T-shirt weather lately and there are all kinds of insects flying about. On a walk mid-day today, I noticed a blue dot zig-zagging across the street toward me. Blue??! Since the color difference was much easier to see over the pavement I was happy to be able to keep track of it as it flew over the grass and into a park. I didn’t have a lot of hope it would stop moving while it was in my sights, but then it appeared to land. I walked cautiously over to the spot and searched the square-foot area where I thought it was. There! It was a shiny blue beetle. Cool!

I got out my cell phone and crouched down. I took a picture from a few feet away and then moved closer, trying to focus the image on the beetle as I went. It was hard to see the screen in the sun, so I wasn’t sure if I’d even gotten the beetle in the frame. Since it wasn’t moving, I decided to risk attaching my macro lens. I got it out, took the case off my cell phone and clipped on the lens. But, just as I started to move in again, it flew away.

This is the best picture I got of it:

Later in the day, I went to look at my front door, where two or three black and orange / red beetles had been yesterday. Sure enough, one was still there. I came within a centimeter of the insect with my gigantic (to it) black phone and clip-on macro lens and was able to get a half dozen shots I could tell were in focus. All the beetle did was wave its antennae.

This is the best picture I got of it:

Inside, I Googled “black orange beetle Oregon” and found out that it’s a soldier beetle. People call it a “beneficial” beetle because it eats “pest” insects like aphids, and, bonus, it pollinates some colorful flowers and plants. The Wikipedia entry on it is surprisingly short, though, considering the beetle is common all over the U.S. and people seem to like it.

Takeaways from the day:

1. Action: SEIZE the moments. Even when you don’t get the outcome you were hoping for, chasing a big dream might be more rewarding than attaining a lesser goal → I had more fun stalking the elusive blue beetle than I did photographing the passive soldier beetle. I really want to see the blue beetle again. I may even go for a walk tonight with the purpose of finding another one, but I won’t go back to get another picture of the soldier beetle. Okay, I might. I’m curious about a front view and a side view.

2. In the world of insects, the sheer number of species means there often isn’t a mound of scientific data on any one type. I count that as opportunity, and as hope. Think of the potential treasure hunts! There is so much on Earth that hasn’t had attention paid to it, even in your own neighborhood.

	Scorpionfly! And a f… on A New York minute
	TickleHead on Hello yellow!
	murphyjb6af2f20ba on Hello yellow!
	Clicks and likes \| T… on New Cards Available
	TickleHead on Red, Green and Blue

Ticklehead

micro adventures with a macro lens