The Urban Pantheist

Imagine my surprise, walking down the sidewalk in a small New England town in January, when encounter a large beetle. It was moving in a determined but unhurried manner. I recognized its strange shape--small front segments, big wide abdomen--from looking through beetle pics on bugguide. I guessed "blister beetle," and set upon handling it very carefully.


Blister beetles are named for their ability to exude a chemical that can cause chemical burns to human skin. This big one here is in the genus Meroe*, a group known as "oil beetles;" presumably the yellow hemolymph they ooze is more memorable for its alarming oily appearance then for blistering naturalists.

These beetles are noteworthy as well for their life cycle: a mobile larva hatches from the egg and makes it way up to a flower where it will hitch a ride on a non-colonial bee. Some oil beetles release a scent that attracts male bees. Then the "triangulin," as this life stage is known, gains entry to the bee's nursery. It metamorphoses into another intermediate stage, less motile and more suited to lazily consuming the fruits of the bee's labor. Eventually it becomes the glorious animal pictured here. As to why it was waltzing down Mountain Road in Suffield in the dead of winter, I blame Climate Change.

(thanks to ankhanu* Origin obscure, may come from early medical literature (the term melloes appears in the writings of Paracelsus);

I'll file this under that thing that happens where once you make yourself aware of something, it pops up all the time. Here's my second banded net-winged beetle in a week.

This tiny male wedge-shaped beetle Macrosiagon limbata* has his feathery antennae out into the air, hoping to catch the scent of a female.




She, like him, is probably on top of a flowering plant, grazing on pollen. Eventually she will lay eggs by the flowers. They will hatch into tiny grubs, who wait by the flowers for wasps that come to drink nectar. When they wasp lands, they climb on board, and ride her back to her nest, disembarking when she lays her own eggs. The beetle larva feeds within the body of the developing wasp larva. Nature is awesome.

* "Large jawed, bordered."

Like its relative the Japanese beetle, the Oriental beetle is a hated pest of turfgrass. Not so much at our house since we treat our lawn with something between benign neglect and half-hearted maintenance. But people interested in a nice carpet of unbroken grass blades don't like the white C shaped larvae that grow into this beetle. They live in the soil, nibbling on the roots of the grass, killing sections of grass, leaving unsightly dead patches. The grown beetles don't make themselves any more welcome, feeding on roses and other ornamental flowers. Accidentally introduced from Asia, this invasive species is being battled with a natural enemy: a commercially available nematode that preys on the Oriental beetle grub.

I wrote that almost exactly 4 years ago, referring to the insect in this picture:

Looks pretty different but both are Exomala orientalis*. The species varies on a light to dark spectrum between the two extremes shown.



* Very outside, from the east

This hairy beast is just a baby. If it makes it to fully grown--and why wouldn't it, it has few predators and is well defended with prickly setae--it will metamorphose into a short blackish beetle with a tawny belt across its back. Both as an adult beetle and as an active larva, the larder beetle Dermestes lardarius* feeds on durable organic matter. This individual was found with many close relatives feeding on the mummy of long-dead mouse. Unlike the relative (Anthrenus verbasci) I covered earlier, larder beetles are almost always encountered indoors, the environment which provides shelter and food to them around the globe.


Aw look at the fuzzy little belly!

* "Skin eater in the larder"

This is another time where I wasn't sure what I was looking at until I examined the photo later. Another little beetle only 3 mm long or so, and delightfully colorful. What a disappointment to realize it's not only non-native, but moonlights as a household pest.


Anthrenus verbasci* is also known as the varied carpet beetle (or more correctly, if awkwardly "variegated carpet beetle). Carpet beetles are a group of beetles that specialize on the dry durable tissues of the long dead. A wool carpet is just a big mat of mammal fur, a priceless taxidermy is a tempting balloon of edible skin, a beautiful set of mounted butterflies is a carpet beetle buffet. This species has a taste for plant tissues as well, becoming a pest in flour mills and food storage facilities.

* This name translates to "mullein wasp."

Photographing a pair of insects engaged in the copulatory act does not necessarily make you a pervert. Whether you are a pervert or not, when insects are mating, you generally have a male and a female both present, increasing your chances of identifying the species in question. You can see that the male has more white on his head and thorax, for example, pervert.

These ladybeetles are very small ones, only a few millimeters long each. I wasn't positive that I was seeing ladybeetles until I cropped the photo to see them closely. This species, Propylea quatuordecimpunctata*, is yet another Eurasian ladybeetle, introduced to North America by accident and intentionally, at different times.

*"A propylaea, propylea or propylaia (/ˌprɒpɪˈliːə/; Greek: Προπύλαια) is any monumental gateway based on the original Propylaea that serves as the entrance to the Acropolis in Athens." (wikipedia) What does that have to do with this beetle? Dunno. Maybe that central double spot made the taxonomist think of the Acropolis for some reason. The rest means "14 spotted."

My new favorite activity is splitting wood. Alex bought me a nice sharp new fiskar axe, and my neighbor's boyfriend (they're both in their 70s--adorable) gave me a huge heavy rusty maul. The older axe blasts through logs like tearing a sheet of paper. When I get a knotty log that the maul bounces off, the sharp fiskar can strip kindling strips off of it.

Anyway, I chopped one log and it blasted apart revealing this wood boring beetle larva. Pretty cool! I fed it to the chickens.

Assistant Curator at work.


In the next room, mealworms begin to wander.

There was a pool party the last night we were there--this is the pool. It turned out that most of the zookeepers were at another pool, but the 12 or 15 of us at this one had a nice time.

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