Continuing from last time, here are a few more interesting art pieces from my students last semester. This time I have picked a set of beetle works. Rogue made a large sculpture of a dung beetle with its ball of …
Pterostichini Blog
Bug’s Life Rap
The extremely talented and clever students in my ESPM40 Insects and Human Society class made a variety of cultural entomology/ insect art projects this semester. I am going to share a few of them on my blog. To start, I …
Graening finds Graeae horror beetle in California cave
Way back in ’07 I described a few new species of Pterostichus from California [1]. All of them had reduced eyes, small body size, and each from limited series of specimens. Although I have personally collected nearly every species of …
Public domain base map
Following up on my post about using GoogleMaps with Cartographer here is a map made using the NASA base map suggested at the cartographer web page.
Who’s up for a Friday night Coleoptera type specimen mystery?
I have the type of Leiradira blandula Tschitscherine. It is without doubt the holotype as the labels match the description, sex, etc. I am equally certain that this species occurs nowhere near Adelaide, South Australia. It is a northeast NSW …
Carabid fern spore feeding
I recently saw some images posted on facebook by “Blackdog To Chan” of an Odacanthine that I am pretty sure is Mimocolliuris (Paramimocolliuris) sinuatiphallus Zhao & Tian. The really cool thing is that Blackdog TC saw it feeding on the spores of …
Plotting Specimens Localities Using Mesquite’s Cartographer and Google Maps Saver
I have finally succeeded in producing what I think will be good distribution maps for publications using Mesquite’s Cartographer. This took me a long time (I have been using Mesquite for many years) but that is no fault of Cartographer. …
Acanthoferonia and the Notonomus-series, the bottom line
Bottom line, Acanthoferonia, as cool as it is, must be treated as a subgenus. Here is a draft abstract of the paper I am writing up now. NOTHING WRITTEN HERE CAN BE CONSTRUED AS BEING PUBLISHED IN THE SENSE OF …
The next best thing to The Stink Beetle
One of the great stories of carabid beetles is their ability to produce, store and deliver defensive chemicals using their paired pygidial glands. Most people that know anything about this, know about the bombardier beetle and its awesome boiling hot …
Ornaments on the carabid family tree
Species currently in the Australian genus Leiradira are some mighty fine looking beetles. What you can’t see well in the habitus images below are the cool modifications of the mouth parts for eating some kind of special food. Some have …
Eight is enough
Plenty of carabids are known to be gregarious. Species of Brachinus, Chlaenius, Bembidion and other, typically riparian species frequently hibernate or aestivate in crowds that are packed gena-by-mandible. Often there can be multiple species all nestled in the same little …
A real people-beetle
Lindroth, in the Carabids of Canada and Alaska, states that Laemostenus complanatus was first recorded in North America by Crotch in 1873. It still amazes me that these relatively big beetles (about 15mm long) have been stowing away on ships …
Amara, out to lunch
An Amara sp. clings to the grass to feed Often people lump all carabid beetles in to the “generalist predator” bin, but there are many, many exceptions. Here is an image of an Amara sp. (I haven’t gotten around to …
Rainbeetle season
Though I typically go out and about looking for ground beetles, occasionally I abandon any thought of self-esteem and chase scarabaeoids, longhorn beetles and such. In California, the autumn and early winter rains bring out both Pleocoma rainbeetles and me …
Register those Sp. Nov.
If you haven’t seen or heard of the new amendment to the The Code you probably have been under a rock (what species of carabids were under there with you?). You can look at the amendment in detail by way …