A different rove beetle?
Some time ago I blogged about a rove beetle that I found in my backyard. It was very peculiar in that it raised its tail like a scorpion and confronted me as I tried to take its picture. Looking at the date, I blogged about this beetle in January of last year.
One of the interesting things about keeping a blog is it has caused me to ask questions that I normally would not ask. The following came up with another similar specimen that I found over the weekend.
After looking at these pictures, I had the following questions.
- Why did I find this beetle just now? They are not common during other parts of the year. Are they common during just a small part of the year?
- This specimen looks a bit different than the other one. It is slightly reddish while the other one is more pitch black.
- It also did not raise its tail as a threat, but instead ran away quickly. There were also several of them instead of just a single one as I found before. It certainly seemed more docile than the other one.
I’m not sure if I have a perfect answer for these questions, but I did a little bit of research and have some ideas.
My suspicions are that this is a different species of rove beetle from the one I found earlier. The characteristics of it just seem a bit too different.
In some respects, I am a bit upset at myself for not getting some more shots of it. They were very determined to get away from me and there were so many interesting things to shoot that day that I just let it have its way and moved on to other subjects. Now that I suspect that it is a different beetle it would have been nice to have some better shots.
I looked in my books and found an interesting beetle called Nodobius cephalus. My book (Insects their Natural History and Diversity) calles them “flexible hunters that seek bark beetle prey under bark and in their galleries”.
As I found these beetles under a bag of gravel, it certainly is a possibility. Of course, this book only covers eastern insects so I’m not sure if it is common on the west coast. More likely, it is a different species as one can see from this page full of different rove beetles. Interestingly, I went through the slide show and noticed that they are all from New England, so it is likely that this one isn’t in the list.
Still, I learned something today and find it interesting how this blog has caused me to ask questions I would have otherwise never thought about.
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Tags: beetle, insect, macro, photography, rove beetle