Eye-strain beetles.

 I've been scrolling and scrolling through thousands of beetle photos, starting with  an image search (hopeless), then BugGuide, looking at Fungus beetles (only 200 pics) then on to iNaturalist; more fungus beetles, then widening the search; one project on iNaturalist, Beetles of BC, lists 4,000 species, with good, clear photos of  most (that's a help!). I looked at them all. And didn't find my beetles. My eyes hurt.

So here's why. I took a photo of a bracket fungus on a log behind the parking lot at Elk Falls. They're common enough that usually I walk on by, but the it has been a dry summer and the usual mushrooms and slime molds weren't visible. So the shelf fungus lucked out.

Red-belted polypore, Fomitopsis mounceae.

I had taken the photo from a fair distance away, and it wasn't until I got home that I looked at it closely. Then I saw the beetles.

Fungus-loving beetles, unidentified.

I've been trying to identify them ever since. I looked first under beetles that feed on polypore fungi; that led me to a wider group of Tooth-necked Fungus beetles. (They have tooth-like projections on the side of the thorax.)  Some looked almost right, but not quite; dark brown beetles, small, pointed oval shaped. And with a definite white band across the front end of the elytra, the hard wing covers. It is that white band that is the problem; expanding to all the beetles in BC, I found a few similar, but they were diving beetles; the wrong shape, the wrong habitat.

I give up. For now. I've posted them to  iNaturalist; maybe someone will recognize them. And next day it's not raining, I'll go back to the same spot and see if I can find more.

This is my idea of fun!

~~~~~~~~~~

 He estado examinando miles de fotos de escarabajos, empezando con una búsqueda por imagen, sin suerte, luego pasando a BugGuide donde miraba escarabajos que viven en los hongos (de estos, solo hay 200 fotos). Luego, no encontrando lo que buscaba, llegué a iNaturalist, examinando primeramente los escarabajos de los hongos, y después ampliando la búsqueda; un proyecto en iNaturalist, Los Escarabajos de Colombia Británica, incluye 4.000 especies en su lista. Las miré todas. Y no encontré las mias. Y mis ojos se sienten quemados.

¿Porqué? Saqué una foto de un hongo políporo en un tronco atrás del estacionamiento de las cataratas Elk. Son bastante comunes, y generalmente paso sin detenerme, pero este ha sido un verano seco y los hongos y los mohos mucilaginosos que encuentro en este sitio no se hallaban visibles. Pues entonces, saqué esta foto del políporo.

1. Es un políporo Fomitopsis mounceae.
2. Y aquí están los escarabajos.

No vi los escarabajos hasta que llegué a casa y miré la foto.

Los he estado tratando de identificar desde entonces. Primero busqué entre "escarabajos que comen hongos políporos". Eso me llevó a una búsqueda más amplia, en el grupo de los escarabajos de hongos con dientes en el cuello. (Así se llaman. Tienen proyecciones parecidas a dientes en ambos lados del tórax.) Algunos casi se parecían a los míos, pero no precisamente; buscaba escarabajos color café oscuro, pequenos, en forma de óvalos con los extremos puntiagudos.Y  con una banda blanca, bien definida sobre la parte delantera de los élitros (la capa dura que cubre las alas). Esa banda blanca es lo que ocasiona el problema. Al abrir la búsqueda a todos los escarabajos de BC, encontré algunos con esta banda, pero eran escarabajos buceadores; la forma es distinta, el habitat completamente diferente.

Por ahora, me rindo. Subí las fotos a iNaturalist; tal vez alguien los conozca. Y cuando deja de llover, voy a buscar de nuevo en el mismo sitio; a ver si puedo encontrar más.

¡Me estoy divirtiendo!

Shimmery Yellow Velvet

 I can't resist a patch of Queen Anne's Lace. Nor can assorted bugs and beetles. In this patch, on the edge of the forest at Eve River, every fully open flower head I looked at carried tidy little brown beetles with black heads. And on one flower centre, I found a new lifer for me, the Yellow Velvet Beetle, Lepturobosca chrysocoma.

Here, with a few of the little brownies.

Google image search is amazing. I posted this photo, and in seconds, I had a screen full of matches. On iNaturalist, then, I found the name and species, and a photo of one taken near where I found this one. But the beetles, (also called the Golden-haired Flower Longhorn) live from Canada to the north of Mexico. One posted to iNaturalist was found in the Northwest Territories, near the Great Slave Lake.

The adults eat flower pollen; the larvae feed on dead wood.

The name, chrysocoma, according to BugGuide, means "gold hair". And it really shines in the sunlight.

The beetle measures up to 2 cm. long. Not counting the antennae.

Queen Anne's Lace, still unopened. No beetles here. Yet.

~~~~~~~~~~~

No puedo pasar un grupo de las flores de zanahoria silvestre (que aquí llamamos Encaje de la Reina Ana) sin detenerme para mirarlas. Y no solo yo; atraen también a gran número de bichos, abejas, moscas y escarabajos. En los bordes del bosque cerca del rio Eve, cada flor abierta llevaba muchos escarabajitos cafés con cabezas negras. Y en el centro de un capítulo floral, se encontró este escarabajo dorado; es la primera vez que veo uno de estos. Es Lepturobosca chrysocoma, el Escarabajo de Terciopelo Amarillo.

Foto: El escarabajo en las flores de zanahoria silvestre, con varios escarabajitos.

La búsqueda por imágenes de Google es asombroso. Apenas subí esta foto, y en segundos, me presentó con una pantalla entera de ejemplares. Entre ellos, encontré en iNaturalist, uno de estos animalitos que se halló cerca del mismo lugar. Pero estos escarabajos viven desde el norte de México hasta Canada. En el mapa de iNaturalist, el registro más al norte está en Northwest Territories, cerca del lago Great Slave. (61.84°N)

Los adultos comen el polen de las flores, y las larvas comen madera muerta.

El nombre científico, chrysocoma, se traduce como "pelo dorado". Y de veras, brilla como oro cuando le alumbra el sol.

Fotos: 

• Otra vista del mismo. Mide hasta 2 cm. de largo, sin contar las antenas.
• Una cabeza de zanahoria silvestre, todavía sin abrir. Y sin escarabajos.

And those beetles ...

I think they're weevils.

These were all over most of the roses on the bush, just skipping the ones where the bees were busy.

Zooming in on a couple. Those aren't weevil stripes: they're flower shadows. I think.

The beetles are tiny, and hard to see clearly, but the longish faces and the antennae;  perched on the tip of the nose, and with a definite angle halfway up, say weevil to me. I've sent a few photos in to BugGuide for a closer ID.

Thistles and critters

A patch of thistles between the blackberry bushes (with burdock alongside; it was a prickly field!) was a-buzz with flying and crawling critters.

Skipper, and a syrphid fly. I think the skipper is Ochlodes sylvanoides, the Woodland Skipper, very common here in BC.

The bees were busy, but in a great hurry, never parking on a flower long enough for me to focus on it. A lot of work to be done; there are blackberries and flyaway thistle fluff to be made, and it all falls on the bees' shoulders, or at least their leg buckets.

More thistles, more critters.

Most thistles are edible, but grazing animals, such as the deer that was browsing in the blackberry patch, usually ignore them. The leaves are spiny, and those spines are sharp, where the blackberry leaves are mostly thornless.

Ten-lined June beetle

Hard done by: first, I sprayed her with the hose, watering the garden, then I rolled her branch around and flashed lights in her face. But she was patient through it all, barely waving an antenna at me once in a while.

Ten-lined June beetle, all wet. Polyphilla decemlineata.

I know she's female, because her antennae are stubby and round. The male's are huge, layered, and shaped like a woman's high-heeled sandal, or opened up, like a stack of spoons.

Male antenna. From 2011.

In the morning, she was gone. She was not waiting until I watered her corner again.

In a riotous garden

Every gardener has their own philosophy of growing things. There are the planners, with their matching trees and balanced areas: the get-it-done-and-forget-it types, looking for easy care plants: the pot movers, who are never content with an arrangement: the clippers and pruners; our last neighbour was one of those. Every weekend he spent the daylight hours undoing all the happy growth that his shrubbery had managed that week.

I am more haphazard. Things get put in -- "here, for now" -- wherever I find a space. I pick up plants I like, then figure out what to do with them later. I don't leave many empty spaces.

Laurie likes a specimen garden, with almost no duplication. It's all very tidy; he fusses over leaves blown in from the maple trees on the street.

My son has an older house with a big lot on the sunny slope of New Westminster, a prime garden spot. And he's at the lavish end of the enthusiast curve. He loves anything that grows, large plants, useful plants, curious plants, old familiar flowers, wild "weeds", exotics, things raised from seeds begged off other gardeners, herbs for the pot, plants that someone said could be eaten, even bigger plants. And he doesn't believe in restraining them; they have their life to live, and he lets them be. And they respond, reaching for the sky above, spreading roots and branches to cover every millimetre of space. Fruit trees, raspberries, day lilies, roses, corn and peas and broad beans, cilantro and epazote, lilacs and grapes (the vine covers most of his shed and is reaching for the nearest pear tree), maple, potatoes, and sunflowers, abelia and lavender, blue-blossom, ... the list goes on.

His compost heaps are over my head.

And the insects love it! He doesn't mind; they're as much a part of the exuberant life in that garden as the veggies are.

Yesterday's bee and the butterfly from the day before were on his abelia bush. And here are a few more.

I don't know what kind of beetle this is. It's a Flower Longhorn. Very angular about the shoulders, with a pointed rear end and marvellous antennae.

A syrphid fly, I think. Now it's the flowers I can't identify. They tower over my head.

Honeybee on the same flower heads.

Dazzling nasturtiums, with tiny white flies here and there. And spiders hiding in the leaves.

Red hollyhocks, far overhead. This one has a few tiny black beetles in the centre.

This vine covers the back half of the shed and is on its way over the driveway to the house. No bugs that I could see on this stalk, but the whole shebang was a-buzz with bees and a tribe of long-legged wasps.

More tomorrow, too.

Six-legged tigers

A couple of days ago, I went over to the vacant lot again, to check on the ant nest (of which, more later). It's been raining off and on, so the puddles are still there, but they've shrunk to about half the size they were a week before. The first one is barely an inch deep now, in the deepest part.

I was crouched over this puddle, trying fruitlessly to get a photo of a fast-swimming black bug, when I noticed what looked like a small fish. At least, it was long and streamlined, and moved like a fish. I abandoned my frustrating bug and went fishing with a small bug-collecting bottle.

The "fish" was also fast, but it attempted to hide in the loose mud at the bottom, and I was able to scoop it out, mud and all. In the bottle, it looked more like a miniature lizard:

Mini lizard with 6 transparent legs? 1/2 inch, jaws to tip of feathery tail.

When I released this one back into the puddle, I saw another, double the size. Too big for my bottle; I chased him all over the puddle with the camera instead.

6 hairy legs, a two-pronged tail, and a pair of sharp-looking hooks in front.

Later, when I looked them up, I learned that they are water tigers, the larvae of the Predatious Diving beetle, which may have been the black bug I was chasing at first. I'll have to go back again and actually catch one to be sure.

These beetles, adults and larvae, can be found in almost any body of water. The larvae hatch from eggs laid inside the stem of underwater plants. Or, in this case, in the stems of plants that at least for a while were underwater. Some live as larvae for up to a year, but in temporary ponds and puddles, they may mature in a few months. When they are ready, they crawl up onto land, make a burrow in the mud, and pupate there. After a week or more, they hatch and return to the water as adults.

Both adults and larvae are air breathers, although they live in water. The adults are scuba divers; they bring their air down with them, holding bubbles under their wings. The larvae breathe through the tip of the abdomen, holding it up just above the surface, but can go a while between breaths.

Two small water tigers. One is breathing; his abdomen tip and the two prongs of his tail are out of the water.

Tigers. The name gives a hint as to their habits; they're voracious predators, able to stalk and kill other insects, small worms, tadpoles, and even fish. And then, there are the defenseless smaller residents of the puddles; they'll take them, too; easy pickings.

Returning to the story: the big water tiger I was following stopped for a meal. The puddle is still as full of ostracods as ever; you can see some resting in the sediment in all three photos above. But here and there they formed clumps or heaps. And the ostracods in these heaps were dancing about like bubbles in a fast-boiling pot. Or like the mating snails on Crescent Beach.

A small clump of happy ostracods.

The water tiger meandered here and there around the puddle, not in any hurry, stopping occasionally to look around. Eventually, he found one of the ostracod gatherings, and dived in headfirst. He dug around for a minute, selecting or trapping one, then turned and sped off with an ostracod in his jaws, to eat it elsewhere. I chased him, trying for a photo, but now he was in a great hurry, in no mood to share his meal with any other water tiger, nor with the shadow above him. I soon lost him.

Selecting the juiciest, fattest ostracod. Tail on the surface, head in the grocery bin.

More info:

• Nature View by Bill Gibbons
• AgriLife Extension
• Photo of larva, BugGuide
• Adult, BugGuide

In a prickly situation

a common red soldier beetle

whiles away the day with a soft-chitined companion.

Some seek quiet, private corners for their trysts;

Others proclaim their love from the highest peaks.

Soldier beetles, Ragonycha fulva, on thistles, White Rock beach.

Ladybug, ladybug, fly ...

... or walkcreep, if you don't feel up to flight at the moment.

This ladybug, the first we've seen this year, landed on Laurie's leg, just outside of the Tim Horton's in Tsawwassen. I took her inside to see if I could identify her; I would have to count her spots and get a good look at her pronotum, the shield between the head and the wing covers. She was quite agitated, and raced around the table. Twice she flew away, only to land on the window behind me. So I brought her home in a bottle Laurie had in his pocket.

Slow down! I can't count your spots!

She's a Multicoloured Asian Lady Beetle, Harmonia axyridis, an imported species. The defining characteristic is the more or less "W" shaped mark on the pronotum. These ladybugs are extremely variable,* with anywhere from no spots to 18, like this one, and in any combination of yellow, black, orange, red, and white.

At home, she came out of her bottle running, and wouldn't stop. Back in the bottle, she went into the fridge to cool off and, I hoped, go to sleep.

I've had trouble with beetles; they're tough little beasties. Often, I take one, sound asleep, out of the fridge, and before I've got the camera focused, it's awake and running again. So I put a light cloth over an ice pack, and park the beetle there. It works, sometimes.

This little lady was closed down tight, legs folded against the belly, antennae at rest. On the cold pack, she sat still. For all of 30 seconds. Then she unfolded one front leg.

"Yawn!"

Next, she started to walk. Slowly. Really s  l  o  w  l  y. About 20 seconds per step.

10 seconds. All legs extended.

14 more seconds. Stepping forward.

8 more seconds. Front leg moves back. Middle leg moves forward.

Each little leg moves in its turn; first, middle, last. And the sides alternate; left front, right front, left middle, etc. An interesting, rather complicated gait. (Compare it to the gait of horses, tigers, cats, us, centipedes.)

Because it allows for rapid yet stable movement, many insects adopt a tripedal gait in which they walk with their legs touching the ground in alternating triangles. Wikipedia.

I think that's what the ladybug is doing. Front-left, rear-left, middle-right, all down at the same time, then the other three.

And so it went, for about a minute; barely one complete round. Then her motors revved up, and she went back to running mode. Now, she's chasing around in her bottle on my desk, waiting for the sunrise, when I'll put her out in the garden.

*For other variants, see BugGuide, and this post.

An Inordinate Fondness #14: Where the beetles are

I get antsy when I don't get my critter fix. I wander about the house, checking doors and windows, spaces under the fridge, the stove, the beds, corners of the ceiling, hoping for at least a tiny spider or a drowsy weevil. I turn over things in the garden, looking for woodbugs and beetles. Winter is a hard, hard time; all the wonderful beasties are holed up, waiting for spring.

It only got worse this year, when I started thinking about the beetle carnival. Now I was searching the blogs, with the same results as I find at home. Nobody else had beetles, either. Here, finally, a lone carpet beetle showed up, and that was it. I fretted and dreamed of spring.

My carpet beetle, snacking on a bud from the maple tree. (Larvae eat clothes; the adults like flowers, especially maple flowers.)

So when the posts carrying beetles began to come in, I checked each one for date and location of find. And there's a definite pattern to them. See:

Posts from North America are all (except one outlier) of the "Remember When" type.

• Dragonfly Woman contributed a Palo Verde Beetle, from last summer,
• Ted MacRae, at Beetles in the Bush, dug out North America's largest scarab beetle from his collection,
• Adrian Thysse reported on Garden beetles, Orsodacne sp.  from last July,
• Art Evans, blogging at What's Bugging You? writes about a False Longhorn Beetle, Cephaloon genus he found back in the 1970s,
• TGIQ (The Geek in Question), for Forgotten Photo Friday, brings us a Carrion Beetle,
• Tim Eisele's kids (The Backyard Arthropod Project) caught him an Oak Timberworm in May, 2010, 
• And in a guest blog post at Scientific American, Beth Jones reports on an infestation of the Asian Long-horned beetle which goes back to the 1990s.
• For good measure, I looked up my old posts from last year, and the year before. Yes, I did have Drugstore Beetles, live ones, too, in February. But they had hatched in my kitchen from pupae brought up from Mexico.

Very good. Misery loves company!

The outlier in the N.American posts comes from Margarethe Brummerman, blogging on Arizona Beetles, Bugs, Birds and More; she reports on a field trip in the Arizona dunes this February, where she found Darkling Beetles, and more.

To the south, in Central and South America, however, there are beetles a-plenty at this time of year:

• On Beetles in the Bush, I found 3;  Bicho Torito from Argentina,
• Gorgulho do Fungo in Brazil,
• and also from Brazil,  Fusquinha. (Checking Ted's blog again, I find he's added another from Brazil.) 
• Troy, at Nature Closeups, has some Mystery Beetles for us,
• And  Leaf Beetles, too. These are all from Costa Rica.
• And Alex Wild went to Ecuador to photograph his Stunning Staphylinid. 

Hmmm ... Maybe I should consider a trip south next year.

There are other places to find beetles, however. For example, in  Czechoslovakia, if we'd got there at the right time, we'd have found a room full of "really excited" entomologists, stooping over cases of beetles. A contingent from the Natural History Museum (UK) was among them; read about it at Beetles: Czech. Or there's a workshop on Scarab Beetles coming up in Peru; Coleopterist's Corner has the details.

As if the list of beetles weren't long enough, a couple of new species have been described; Metapocrytus, reported on Salagubang, and Arsipoda geographica, named after the National Geographic Society.

And I have no idea how to classify this last post: Jason Goldman, blogging on ScienceBlogs, has a video about a Zombie Cyborg Beetle. Really! What next?

Unidentified beetle, from Watershed Park, Delta, 2009. Definitely not a zombie.

The next edition of An Inordinate Fondness will be hosted by Dragonfly Woman. Send her your submissions by April 15th; you can use this handy submission form if you prefer.

Also, consider hosting a future edition; spaces are available from June on. Send Ted an email to book your slot.