The mysterious beetle solved?
I mentioned in a previous post that I found a strange new insect when photographing this weekend. I picked up a bag of dirt and found some interesting things underneath to shoot. As I was above to coax a millipede onto a white sheet of paper, I noticed something tiny moving in the dirt. I zoomed to 5x on my MP-E 65 and took several shots in an attempt to capture it. Unfortunately none of them turned out as well as I would have hoped, but I received two shots that were decent enough to attempt identification.
I looked through my Audobon field guide to no avail. The bug just didn’t appear to be there. So I got out my huge hardcover book on insects and slowly went through the hundreds of shots, hoping for a match. After some time, I may have found a match. This appears to be a spider beetle – family Anobiidae, subfamily Ptininae. Here’s another shot of it.
Unfortunately the shots I found in the book and those on the web have so far not provided an exact match. I suspect this may be because my book covers only insects in eastern North America. For some reason, I have noticed that many books seem to discount the western half of the United States. Perhaps this may be because they don’t want to dedicate large portions of a book to insects that only exist in one geographic area. I remember as a young child being dismayed after seeing an interesting animal in a guide book only to find that it only lives in the West. Still, this makes it even more difficult for us in the Puget Sound. Though we share many insects with the East, we also have a number of our own which don’t seem to be covered in many guide books. Even the Audobon guide, which supposedly covers the entire country, tends not to cover insects particular to this region.
Therefore my current theory is that this is indeed a spider beetle, but is either a less common species or a species isolated to this part of the country.
Even still, though this remains a bit of a mystery it is always exciting finding and learning about new creatures in my backyard.
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Tags: beetle, macro, mystery, photography, spider beetle
I have never seen anything like it before and an interesting beetle for sure! I think the biggest problem is that many bugs, insects are identified by a microscope and not with the naked eye! Your macro shots do help bring it in but there are certain species of dragonflies who can only be identified by its sex organs. Being there are so many beetle/bug species out there . . it is almost impossible to to have a book that has every species in it. I am happy with the homework you did and calling it a spider beetle!
You’ll have an easier time identifying this beast by carefully counting the legs and body segments. By both counts it will come out as an arachnid, not an insect.
Well that’s a bit embarassing. When I first looked at the shot I took the front two legs to be antennas. Of course, now the begging question is “What kind of spider is it?”
it looks more like a type of mite or tick even