Alex Wild on insects, science, and photography
Here’s a photograph I haven’t looked at for years, pulled from my 2006 files. It’s one of my favorite beetles from Tucson, a large bostrichid wood-boring beetle called Apatides fortis. This one showed up at a blacklight in the yard. photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D ISO 100, f/14, 1/250 [...]
Takashi Komatsu travelled to the Amazon earlier this year and did a phenomenal job capturing photographs of the rich entourage of arthropods that travels with army ants. For example: Go see the rest of the series.
The prairie is covered this week in shining flower beetles (Olibrus, in the family Phalacridae). They are aggregating in nearly every composite flower head, with a fair number just floating about among the grasses. The adults feed on pollen, and their sheer numbers make me wonder if there will be enough pollen left over to [...]
This week was warm enough to go insect hunting in the yard, so the Friday beetle is back with new material. I snapped a few shots of this little staphylinid under a brick, figuring I’d identify it later. That turned out to be a more complicated process than I’d anticipated.
If you peel back the bark of an old stump in the forests of western North America, there’s a good chance you’ll find some of these attractive tank-like insects. This is Ostoma pippingskoeldi, a predatory beetle in the family Trogossitidae. They lurk about under bark searching for soft-bodied prey, including the larvae of other beetles. [...]
We here at Myrmecos Blog don’t care to voice our opinion of talk show host Glenn Beck. But we are rather enamored of dung beetles, those gorgeously ornamented insects who prevent the world from being buried in feces. Thus, we were pleased to find the following Facebook project in our inbox this weekend: Can This [...]
Meet Dynastes granti. This behemouth of an insect is North America’s heaviest scarab beetle, found in the mountains of the American southwest where adults feed on the sap of ash trees. I photographed these spectacular insects a few years ago while living in Tucson. The impressive pronotal horn on the beetle pictured above indicates a [...]
Sandalus niger is one of the oddest beetles in eastern North America. While most parasitic insects are concentrated in other orders- notably Hymenoptera and Diptera- Coleoptera contains relatively few parasites. But there are a few. Beetle larvae in the small polyphagan family Rhipiceridae attack cicada nymphs in their underground burrows. Our local species is Sandalus [...]
Scarites sp. Ground Beetle (Carabidae) Urbana, Illinois As the summer bug season freezes to a close here in Illinois, our attention turns increasingly to the cryptic habitats where insects settle in to overwinter. The flowers have faded, but insects can still be found under tree bark, in rotting wood, and in leaf litter. This ground [...]
Alaus oculatus (Elateridae) – The Eyed Elater Illinois One of North America’s largest beetles, the eyed elater is more than an inch long. Alaus oculatus is widespread in the deciduous forests of eastern North America where their larvae are predators of wood-boring beetles. Other species of Alaus occur in the south and west. This individual [...]
A personal blog by Illinois-based biologist and photographer Alex Wild.
Myrmecos- derived from the ancient greek word for "ant"- hosts Alex's musings about these and other little creatures that share our planet.
Questions? Email alwild [at] myrmecos.net; or follow @Myrmecos on Twitter.
