Insect Picture of the Day

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I like darklings. They just get out and truck around, oblivious to danger around them. You know, on account of them being armored vehicles.

This one crawled out of my lawn and onto the sidewalk as I was passing by. Normally darklings are kind of sluggish, but the ambient temperature was close to 38°C (100°F) and for a thermally-driven metabolism that means you can run at top speed. And this guy was taking advantage, moving at a speed I normally associate with ants a tenth his size. He was cruising.

Does anyone out there know if darklings can fly? I get the impression that they can’t. They are Coleoptera (literally: “hidden wings”) which means they should have a pair of flight wings under their shell wings, but I’ve never seen one unfurl and go.

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[Edit: this is a duplicate of the photo from June 12, 2008. I was clearly asleep at the wheel this morning. I even wrote up an all-new post for it and everything. I'll replace this with a different image later tonight. Thank you to the alert readers who pointed this out and reminded me.]

Jeremiah Fargo got a decent shot of a beetle here. Not sure on species; it’s probably a darkling of some kind.

I particularly like this shot for the surprise feature–can you see the phoretic mite?

We’ve mentioned phoresis before; it’s the “bus-riding” kind of parasite. This beetle looks like it’s just landed or just about to take off, so that little might probably went much further than it planned…

Thanks, Jer!

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It’s going to be one of those days: I got way ahead of schedule, and then suddenly my ahead of schedule became “out of posts”.

Thank you to Jeremiah Fargo for reminding me that insectpod had run out… and for providing today’s picture, a darkling in the act of refolding its wings.

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This is the same common ground beetle we saw last week. Thanks are due to Tim Eisele for pointing out that this is probably genus Eleodes, which is in the darkling family, Family Tenebrionidae. I really like this photo because it’s got “the human factor” in it.

I find two things about this photo particularly interesting.

First, taking the photo. Several people have written to ask how I take bug photos. A small part of it is having an eye for composition, but don’t mistake this for talent: this is a skill that can be learned. The biggest part is knowing my equipment. I know about how close I can get before the autofocus will stop working, and how far away I can be and still get a composition that shows the insect clearly. But sometimes it’s just dumb luck, which is the case with this photo. The bug was moving too fast for the autofocus to follow, and the laps it was making around my hand made it hard for me to even look through the viewfinder. I knew at that point that it was a matter of luck, so I decided to make it a numbers game and take lots of shots. I set the focus distance manually and then just followed the beetle around my hand, hovering the camera about where I thought the focus distance was.

The second thing is about the bug itself. If you try to pick up a stinkbug by pinching its sides, you will discover that it is amazingly strong. It lifts its legs up and back and actually shrugs itself out of your grasp. I have yet to be able to pick up one of these bugs and keep hold of it in this fashion. I fear that gripping it any harder than I already do will result in crushing the bug.

Anyway, I got really lucky with the numbers game, so today is a twofer. Enjoy!

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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.

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This photo of a darkling beetle (Family Tenebrionidae) really shows off how shallow the Depth-Of-Field on my camera macro really is. In the end it’s a nice picture of its antennae. I actually got two shots of this beetle; the other one focuses on its shoulder but the antennae and even its face are out of focus.

It was fun taking this picture because the beetle was exposed on an asphalt walkway. When I loomed over it, it became alarmed and scuttled for the shelter of a safe, dark place. Once I got down to asphalt level to take the photo (and stopped moving), my camera became the nearest safe, dark place. As a result I got several pictures of this beetle, but all of them are of it charging head-on! When I circled around to photograph it from the side, it turned and continued to seek out shelter under my camera.

Beetles, huh? Can’t live with ‘em, can’t… well, actually, we can live with ‘em just fine. In fact, without ‘em, we’d be up to our eyeballs in dog poop and rat corpses.

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25% of all known species¹ are types of beetles. This preponderance of taxa led J.B.S. Haldane to say, “If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of creation, it would appear that God has an inordinate fondness for stars and beetles.” There are over 20,000 beetle species in Family Tenebrionidae. I am not certain that this is in fact a darkling, but it seems to match the taxon.

This beetle turned up in my house a week ago. It was about 8mm long and its black, pitted carapace flashed iridescent green in the sunlight, making for a neat picture. My wife asked about the pitting on its shell, and I told her the dimples helped it travel farther when flying, like a golfball. Telling outrageous whoppers like that is nearly half the fun of running this site!

¹ My wife saw this and asked if I had forgotten “…of insect” after species. Nope. 25% of all known species of anything are beetles.