Insect Picture of the Day

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I want this officially on record: this is a photo of my wife putting a bug on me.

Yes, yes, I was the one taking the picture, and yes, I asked her to do it, but look, that is so totally not the point! Bug! On me! Because wife!

(…because wife awesome, maybe…)

I took this picture yesterday. Liz and I went for a drive around the West edge of Utah Lake, where the desert climate asserts itself just yards from the shoreline. The type of fauna you find in this hybrid clime are nature’s camels: bugs that need a plentiful water source to thrive but, you know, not right here. So it is that in addition to desert-adaptation like tiny size, you also see strong-flying bugs (high mobility means ability to reach water quickly) and quite a few beetles. (Their hard shell helps keep them from drying out.)

I grew up in these deserts. When I was a boy, we called this critter a stinkbug, even though no noticeable odor was prevalent. The reason why is that when this beetle is disturbed, it adopts the most bizarre defensive posture imaginable:

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They don’t scuttle away in this posture; they just stop and stick their butts up in the air like this. This is, perhaps, why we called them stinkbugs: does that posture not say to you “smell my butt, smellll my buuuuutt!” Because it does to me. There is a red spot on its body near its butt that gets exposed to the air when it does this. Perhaps it is emitting quinones or some other chemical defense; I can only assume from this posture that it is making stinky of some kind. Whatever it is, it’s not an odor that humans can detect. Or at least, that I can detect.

Yes, I’ve sniffed their butts. Shut up.

These guys get up to about 2.5cm in length; this one was easily over 2cm.

As a teenager I would sometimes go hiking at night. There’s almost never cloudy weather in the desert, so a full moon meant you didn’t need a flashlight. One night back in 1990 or so I was out walking a favorite trail. As I trudged up a familiar dune, I noticed several of these beetles scuttling about on the sand. There were at least half a dozen of them, more of them in one place than I had seen separately all year. As I crested the rise, the moonlight shone across the dune valley I was about to hike down, and the whole desert floor was moving. Hundreds of beetles were crawling across the sand in front of me. It didn’t feel like a swarm because the beetles weren’t clumping up and crawling over one another. It was just that every square foot of ground had a beetle in it. All of them were plodding along in random trajectories, going about whatever beetle business beetles go about in the desert under a full moon.

It is an image that has stayed with me through the years. Whenever I go home to visit my parents, I make a point of stepping out at night to see if the beetles are swarming. I haven’t seen them since… but that hasn’t stopped me from checking.