As I was photographing and databsing the Cicindelinae from the collections of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science I came across this specimen collected on the 10th June 1921, Chicago Illinois. The beetle is Cicindela hirticollis hirticollis (could be a boldly marked ssp rhodensis as they readily intergrade along their boundaries) and is one…
The 2011 Ig Nobel ceremony took place yesterday at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. The award is sponsored by Improbable Research, an organization that gathers fascinating, odd, and outright hilarious research papers that triumph the idea that not all science is boring. Among this year’s distinguished recipients was fellow entomologist and blogger David Rentz, who received the IgNobel in Biology for…
These large and interesting Lycidae beetles (Lycus fernandezi) were abundant in south eastern Arizona a few weeks ago. Constantly flying between flowers and moist sand they were making for easy photography targets. I thought to myself “here is a great opportunity to catch a beetle taking off!”. Wait for it… Wait for it… Crap….
OK – a few apologies for not having full images *yet* of the larvae in question (I will in a few days!). Over the weekend I was out with a group of Berkeley students on Mount Hamilton and PhD candidate Meghan Culpepper collected a few species of Scaphinotus and a some larvae! So the specimen…