The Urban Pantheist

These are the pupae of the superworm darkling beetle (Zophobas morio) being raised to be food animals for birds and reptiles. These ones have missed being fed out, and are busily changing into large beetles. Then they'll breed, produce eggs, and their babies will feed the babies of birds and reptiles.

I have yet another new (used) camera so the settings for this photo are particularly weird. I'm gonna call it part of the zoo horror movie why not.

A coworker called me over to identify some insects lurking in a mealworm colony. They were so small (about 2 mm long each) I couldn't even tell what they were at first--I actually thought they were fruit fly pupae.

I took this picture and could see that they were beetles. Not sawtooth grain beetles, because these lack the distinctive teeth on the thorax. I went to my pest control text, since it seemed likely that they were known grain pests.

It soon became clear that these were flour beetles (Tribolium sp.). There are two common types, T. castaneum the red flour beetle--so called because of the reddish brown color--and T. confusum the "confused" flour beetle, which gets its name because it's easily confused with the other. Really. The "confused" is more tolerant of cold temperatures, and is more common in northern climates. However, the red has another field marking that helps remove the confusion: it flies, while the other does not. I was told these beetles had been observed flying, allowing me to identify them to species.

I was also interested to learn that both kinds of flour beetles are in the family Tenebrionidae: the darkling beetles. Darkling beetles are what I call the adult form of mealworms. So the mealworm colony was infested with their own tiny cousins. Hard to consider them contaminants, more like freeloaders.