Photograph by Paul Burnett.
Ergates spiculatus – Pine sawyer beetle, San Jose, California. See also BugGuide.
Ergates spiculatus
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This page contains a single entry by Matt Young published on July 27, 2009 12:00 PM.
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I found this guy stunned on a sidewalk under a street light before sunrise. I carried him around showing him to my co-workers for a couple of hours, then (outside) threw him into the air and he flew away. I took a dozen or so pictures - he’s all velvety underneath.
Cool beetle! As large as he is, you are lucky he didn’t rip your fingers off. I am assuming he/she must have just ate, otherwise you would have lost a digit or two. @:-D
Handsome fellow, though I doubt I could have gotten my bare flesh that close to him. When an insect is that large, even if I know they’re unlikely to bite or sting, fear overcomes the desire to examine them that closely.
Sure, but all those 400,000 +/- species of beetle are still insects!!111one!!1111111!!!eleven!!!
You can be sure a beetle won’t sting you, as they don’t have stingers. But he had a healthy set of side-opposed jaws, looking a bit like small wire cutters. I’ll try to get a picture up Tuesday.
I hear they’re edible.
(grins) Try growing up with him - you’d have gotten over it REAL quick! My brothers and I were probably the only kids in the neighborhood that would see a tarantula and run over to pick it up and bring it home for a pet! And now I’m the official bug-remover in my family - AND my office!
Dad, I wish you’d had this camera back when we were raising Black Widows on the kitchen windowsill. THAT would be cool photo material!
Oddly enough, I’ve never had a problem with tarantulas. Maybe because they look so furry and move relatively slowly.
Pet black widows on the kitchen windowsill? Yeah, too bad that didn’t make it into the family album :)
Here’s a face-on “jaws” picture: http://www.paulburnett.com/beetljaw.jpg. Note also his compound eyes, and the hairs on his mouth parts.
Here’s picture of the velvet underside of his thorax: http://www.paulburnett.com/beetlvlv.jpg.
If anybody cares, the camera I used here is a 8 megapixel Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS - see http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/c[…]odelid=16347 - highly recommended. I take all my pictures in 3264 x 2448 pixel mode, so I can zoom way in and still have a high resolution picture.
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