Don’t expect much but persiflage for this week: I’m crazy busy and can’t brain. But we do have a nice panoply of beetle photos from reader Jacques Hausser in Switzerland:
Here some pictures of Cetonidae. I inserted a photo from Wikipedia commons #4.
#1 The European rose chafer, Cetonia aurata (family Cetonidae, sub-family Cetonini), is a rather big (about 20 mm) and somptuously colored beetle. The coloration is physical, the structure of the cuticle of the beetle reflecting mostly left-handed circular polarized light.
#2: The adult rose-chafer lives on flowers, eating mostly pollen and stamens – and if necessary ripping apart the flowers themselves to reach their food: rose chafers are not unanimeously appreciated by rose gardeners. Here on Philadelphus (mock-orange), its long squared “nose” (clypeus) covered by pollen (what gives it a rather bovine look),
#3: Coloration is variable, here a vividly red-and-green specimen (on a wild carrot). Note the “beard” used to brush and gather pollen and, interestingly, the softly rounded slot on the margin of the elytra. Most of the beetles fly with the elytra (hardened forewings) passively open, what induces drag and slows them, but not the Cetonini. Their elytra are welded together and stay closed. They can only be slightly lifted up to unfold the large rear wings, which then work through this margin slot.
#4: This beautiful composite photo by Bernie Kohl (public domain, Wikipedia commons) shows the takeoff of a rose chafer, elytra closed. Their flight is very efficient, powerful, straight and fast.
#5: The babies are less attractive. They eat mostly rotting wood and twigs, and can be found in compost heaps, where unfortunately they are frequently mistaken for cockchafer grubs and destroyed. The trick: rose chafer grubs have a small head and a big bum, for the cockchafer it is the contrary.
#6: Is this splendid bronze specimen another color variant? It could easily be so, but no. It is another, very similar species, and even another genus: Protaetia cuprea (subspecies bourgini). The main difference between the two genera, the shape of the mesosternal process, is hidden on this picture, but the whitish spot on the “knees” (look at the middle leg) provides a clue. The flower is Angelica sylvestris.
#7: Some smaller species don’t show such a gleaming glory. Here is Tropinota hirta on a hawkweed (Hieracium sp.)…
#8: … and Oxythyrea funebris, busily destroying an iris bud to reach the stamina. It is easily recognizable from the previous one by the six white spots on the pronotum.
Beautiful photos, wow!
Now I know what the beetles were that I saw eating olive blossoms in Provence a few years ago! (Rose chafers.)
Talking of olives, some better news a couple of weeks ago over that nasty pathogen Xylella fastidiosa
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35917107
Beautiful beetles, Jacques! And so many of them!
..”an inordinate fondnesss”,,,,
🙂 How appropriate.
Great images. The flying beetle is fascinating.
“Tuesday: April 18, 2016”
Well, on the plus side, the week will be over quicker than we had expected and you’ll have to brain less.
I tried to post this an hour or so ago — good chance it went into the apparently random WordPress blackhole. Just in case I violated dah Roolz, I’ll post the personal anecdote separately.
“Their flight is very efficient, powerful, straight and fast.” And, it should be added, cetoniine flight is also very maneuverable — very like the bees they compete with for pollen, and frequently mimic.
The cetoniine fix — the notch that allows the beetle to fold the elytra in flight is so simple and elegant, without compromising armor or respiratory economy. It’s a wonder so few other beetles managed anything similar. As Haldane and others have said, the Creator is apparently inordinately fond of beetles –but xhe must have slept at the switch for this aspect of design.
[This anecdote is the part that I thought might have been too identifying to conform to this blog.. I’ve tried to fuzz it a bit more… Again, I think WordPress did it!]
Cetoniines are sadly lacking in the maritime Pacific Northwest, so I’m also excited to see them when I travel south. By far the commonest cetoniines in the Amerian are the bee-like, memorably-named and fairly speciose genus Euphoria.
A bit of folklore from grad school– a couple of friends told me of an incident involving one of their entomology profs at their previous school. It seems the prof was collecting Euphoria [he had published on the genus], and somehow one of the beetles escaped his net and took refuge in his ear. Like most scarabs, Euphoria are powerfully built for tunneling, so he needed medical assistance to remove the Euphoria.
So far, this did happen. The next part is the folklore: He is said to have run into the little clinic in some pain, and yelled at the nurse on duty, “Help me, I have a Euphoria lodged in my ear.” The nurse is said to have called the police in the impression that he had injected some euphoriant drug…
This was current enough to spawn a couple of limericks. Moral lesson, don’t do this if your name scans in limerick form!
Ah, one of the great academic legends, apocryphal or not. 😀 If it didn’t happen, it should have.
I appreciate the plants being identified. Beautiful pictures.
Very nice beetles…they are worth much more attention than they usually get from people.
What a cool story! I did not know there were beetles that could fly with closed elytra.
What an energy rich food–pollen & stamens. Have the plant attack-ees figured out some way to combat them?
Thanks, Jacques–great photos and backstory!