Half-insane "dung scarabs"

I managed to find three Cotinis mutabilis today (two soggy, one sitting on ground).

While still underwater, the less drowned of the two wet scarabs expelled a beautiful white jet of liquid excrement when I grabbed it. Cotinis is a cetoniine flower/fruit scarab (not a melolonthine June beetle, as the English name suggests), but its defense mechanisms certainly wouldn't look out of place on a smelly Egyptian ballroller!

The more drowned of the two was unconscious

I tried to video them in the sun (the devices are terrible in shade), but like several previous attempts the enormous beetles simply overheated and ran away

The less-drowned flew off

The ground one burrowed to escape the sun

I left the unconscious beetle under a tree, and after recovering it stayed in the shade licking fruit juices. Its exoskeleton was severely "rusted" though; it certainly wouldn't have been a good spokesbeetle for the Domino campaign.




I couldn't allow half of my remaining photo subjects to casually sink into the ground, so I dug up and seized the digger

More accurately, the digger (whose back was by then covered in white liquid droppings after a misfire) seized me right after I seized it

It inseminated my finger, but not before carefully excreting brown sludge to relieve itself

(Cotinis males will repeatedly mate with fingers, other males, and in one instance a metal lid; when one's adult life is normally a handful of months, not being reckless carries a severe genetic-fitness risk)



I carried both of them to a shady area, where they had some minor fights over apple peel (the rusty beetle was quite famished and zealously monopolized its food) and later half-buried their faces in the dirt for a few hrs in an attempt to ward off the heat

After they finished sleeping I offered some more drinks (see below)

Overheated finger addict licks melon

I couldn't initially find the rusty beetle after it woke up, but when the sun cooled off (my only and last chance to get a video) the "finger addict" was nowhere to be seen, the rusty beetle having evidently evicted it from the fruit










Random update: moldy-smelling kitchen towel shreds (I have a cocofiber shortage) are no place for a darkling beetle to be burrowing in, so I released the Coniontis

Fun misadventures in bugworld, Domino edition

trap

The orange-juice trap mentioned earlier failed to catch a fly, let alone Cotinis mutabilis. In desperate need of footage for my sci-outreach campaign, I decided to try fiddling with the summer nocturnal insects instead.

Results of night garden walks a few days ago and today:

• Many small (less than a cm) and medium (roughly a cm) click beetles on ground
• Not a single carabid in sight, oddly.
• Many moths on oregano inflorescences, including a pink sp (Pyrausta inornatalis). My camera is lousy at night flashlight pics though
• No living Coniontis, despite many corpses

Cotinis baiting 1

Cotinis mutabilis is an excellent species for use in entomology outreach efforts: it is enormous, breathtakingly beautiful, day-active, and isn’t excessively well-known like the Monarch or the European honeybee.

Luckily for me, I managed to obtain a jug of overripe orange juice; hopefully efforts to attract and obtain video clips of the huge fruit scarabs will go well.

Trip pics

Amata? Very widespread and abundant

Last month I saw a number of colorful bugs while away. Unfortunately, due to being in a severe rush I could barely look at most of them for more than a few minutes

Medium-sized gregarious leafbeetle

Clanis bilineata pair

Stag

Dying giant longhorn

Other finds included some sort of giant brown starry-specked pentatomid-y truebug, flat millipedes with rose-colored bands, and tons of squished giant gold-green carabids (Carabus?). I also managed to see living bristletails and tiger beetles for the first time in my life.

The sheer biodiversity was quite strange, because I most certainly was not camping in the middle of a South American rainforest. In fact, the orange moth was living in a world of inescapable tobacco fumes.

Summer continues well

Normally I spend most of my time getting very mad over beetle-related things, and I wasn't expecting last post's Coniontis to survive the night.

It survived anyways.

The animal seemed to have odd behavior for a dying specimen; despite initially being too exhausted to walk, it displayed a short bout of suspicious antenna-waving (normally moribund beetles refuse to move unless poked around) in my hand.

I just concluded it was somewhat healthy but still moribund.

Then, I noticed it had changed positions in its container when I wasn't looking.

After prodding it a bit more around midnight, it walked without showing weakness and slowly ate a fruit piece.

As of this afternoon it is quite healthy. Perhaps it was simply stunned for a few hours after being overheated in its spiderweb...?

Summer begins well

7/9:

This afternoon I saw my first Cotinis mutabilis adult of the year

A short while later, I found an area with extremely large amounts of dead webbed Coniontis

One animal was still alive and hanging midair in silk, but after I removed it its sickly behavior suggested that it was too exhausted to recover from its ordeal




hopefully the rest of the summer is productive

Fun summer misadventure #1

A small (roughly 5mm) beetle landed on my neck about a week ago. It was apparently some sort of alleculine.

I tried to pose it for photos, but it ran like a bolt and eventually flew off after several failed attempts



Then, I found what was apparently the same animal inside my pants; I used fruit to placate it and this time it posed for the pic above

Due to absentmindedness I left it overnight in a container away from my house, but due to quick thinking I saved its life. It flew off evidently unharmed the next morning

Relocation notice

The site has moved here due to issues with email and blog spam. Sorry about the posts before this one disappearing.

Also note that my Google account has changed