Soldier fly larva, predacious diving beetles, and cheese salesmen
This is another mishmash of cool things I’ve seen lately. Today I’m on a 99 day streak of adding observations to iNaturalist. I still need to calculate my exciting stats for March but for now here are some things I have been excited to see. Can’t wait to see what I find tomorrow.
Soldier fly larva
The family contains over 2,700 species and I don’t know what kind of soldier fly this will turn into. I don’t think all of their larva are aquatic so that could be a starting place. Here are a few of my past pictures of soldier flies in general.
Water Tigers (Predacious diving beetle larva)
I’ve found 3 different predacious diving beetle larva over the last few days. They are sometimes called water tigers. When I found the first one, I had no idea what it was, and I thought it kind looked like a mayfly nymph but not. I randomly guessed stonefly. Inaturalist doesn’t seem to have a vision model for these yet. Maybe if I feed enough of them in it will be able to ID them.
This water tiger that I found last night was less than 1cm. It was identified as the genus Dytiscus. Often when I am trying to get a sense of a thing, when it gets identified I go look up all of my observations from that taxon (group). In this case I had one other observation of dytiscus and I got it six days ago. It was the vertical diving beetle that I caught because it had caught a frog.
I think there’s maybe something that is hard for us vertebrates to believe, when our invert neighbors are preying on us.
Crawling Water Beetles
I have found crawling water beetles from the genus peltodytes a bunch of times now. They are super cute they move like maniacs. They are super tiny. They are starting to become one of my favorites.
Kinds of water beetles
(This part is probably only a vaguely accurate). So far I’ve come to understand that there are essentially 3 kinds of water beetles.
Predacious diving beetles—They’re predacious
Water scavenger beetles—They scavenge
Crawling water beetles—They breakdance
And there are bunches of insects and other invertebrates that are not even beetles
Peltodytes
I was going through my photos and kept going back to this one even though it was blurry. The way it was cropped, the beetle looked like it was standing. I kept wanting to draw cowboy boots on it.
And then Brian helped me think of why. It’s the “hanker for a hunka cheese guy” from Saturday morning cartoons in the 70’s and 80’s.
In case you don’t remember him.
That’s all for tonight. Go eat some cheese. I’m relieved to know it’s a healthy snack that won’t spoil your dinner. I eat a lot of it.