Cryptopod: Latvian Lovers

Hello and welcome to Mystery Week at En Tequila Es Verdad! Thanksgiving is coming up in the USA, I’ve got a book to finish and publish by Friday, and there’s enough Serious Stuff going on that I feel like maybe a break would do us good. So we’re going to have nothing but mysteries and pretty pitchoors!

Let us begin in Latvia, where RQ photographed some absolutely marvelous cryptopods over the summer.

Image shows a dark brown and white speckled fly perched on a pretty pink rosebud.
Crytopod I

So there’s a fly unlike those I typically see around these parts. I love it’s little alternating squares of chocolate and cream.

Crop of the previous image, showing the fly in greater detail. The head is alternate gray and brown stripes. The eyes are a nice russet color.
Crytopod II

I know many people don’t much like flies, but I often quite enjoy them. As long as they’re not the Bitey McBiterson kind. Fuck those flies. RQ, these little delights don’t bite, right?

Summer with its flowers seems so long ago already! Seeing this next sweet cryptopod transports me right back to the warm and heady.

Image shows a wee little bug in the center of a fully blown pink rose. It's got two oval-shaped wing cases in patterns of black and yellow blotches.
Crytopod III

Stop and smell the roses, but don’t inhale the little ones making said roses their homes!

Crop of the previous image showing the wee one in more detail. It has a very hairy head, and a fringe of pale yellow hair along its bottom.
Crytopod VI

Doesn’t that look like the ideal way to spend a summer afternoon? As long as you’re not allergic to pollen, that is.

And now, finally, we get to the Latvian Lovers.

Image shows two bugs hanging veritcally from a rosebud. They are attached at their bottoms, pretty obviously reproducing.
Crytopod V

What a romantic setting! All those pretty pink rose clusters surrounding them adds quite a lot to the ambiance.

Crop of the previous showing the top bug. It has a furry gray head with white fringes.
Crytopod VI

I love those soft little heads! There are few insects I feel tempted to pet, but this is one. I’d love to pat its wee noggin very gently, but I doubt it would appreciate the gesture. Especially seeing as it’s busy getting it on.

Crop showing the bottom bug. It has brown legs, a dark gray underbelly, and a furry chest.
Crytopod VII

Love this little bug belleh! At least, I think it’s a bug. I have a horrible time telling between bugs and beetles. The alliteration works either way, so that’s a little bit of all right, then.

Hope you recognize some of these Latvian loverlies, my darlings, and enjoy them all! What shall I do next? UFDs, Mystery Flora, Fungi, something else?

(And for those who want to fill their week with hard-hitting SJW stuff instead of funsies, follow me on Facebook. I do quite a bit of ranting there these days.)

{advertisement}
Cryptopod: Latvian Lovers
{advertisement}

22 thoughts on “Cryptopod: Latvian Lovers

  1. rq
    1

    None of these beauties bite, fortunately!
    As for telling beetles and bugs apart, look for a triangle! If there’s a triangle with the pointy end pointing down between the wings like so (a more obvious example) it is a bug, or Hemiptera. If that little bit of carapace between the head and the wings is rounded like so, it is a beetle. This is a generally applicable rule, though I don’t doubt there are exceptions in both cases.
    Also beetles have much cooler antennae and claws on their little feet (of course, I’ve forgotten all the scientifically proper names for all these bits).

    ALSO, the Latvian Lovers are not doing it on a bed (trapeze?) of roses, so you have something of a Mystery Flora in there, too!

    Finally, Cryptopod III and VI is one of my favourite insects since I discovered its existence. I look for it especially every year, along with a few other beemitators in the same and other Orders. I think there’s a short-list of 5 different beemitators that I have managed to catch on-camera (with varying quality, of course).

  2. 3

    Fine close-ups, rq! I shoot vertebrates for fun, but insect photography is deadly serious business, and a lot more difficult than the uninitiated can appreciate.

  3. 4

    Even though their typical antennae aren’t showing, the lovers must be cockchafers (Melolontha sp.). The flies are common flesh flies (Sarcophaga sp.). I don’t know the beetle.

  4. 7

    Thanks for the tip, rq, on the Beetle/Bug differences. That helps a lot.

    Really great shots on them as well. I’m just starting to try to learn the tiny critters in my area, so I don’t have a clue about these, but they are all beautiful shots.

  5. rq
    8

    Thanks! I’ve always been more fascinated by the tiny critters around us, though I have to say, the ratio of Pictures Worthy To Be Sent To My Blogger Friend vs. Ew, Who Focussed That? is… well, heavily weighted towards one side. You can probably guess which. ;)

  6. rq
    9

    You and Giliell seem to have it right with the june bugs (although my translation may be off, since a relatively recent trip to the Museum of Nature here revealed to me that there are maijvaboles and jūnijvaboles, two different beetles, where I’d always assumed that the giant beetles were what we called june bugs back in Canada. The ones that like to hit windowscreens on warm late spring evenings and die in stacks on the windowsill.

  7. rq
    11

    So is “Käfer” any insect with a hard carapace…? Or just the beetle-resembling ones? In Latvian, we separate them into blaktis ((true) bugs) and vaboles (beetles – depending on local dialect, can also be vambole and/or bambel).

  8. rq
    12

    The trick is to practice! Which of course you know. And patience, and also the ability to deal with the frustration of your model flying/crawling off before you can take the actual shot because goddammit your manual focus is being an idiot again and it’s not because you’re too slow with it but because it’s fucking with you for fun. ;) Good luck!

  9. 13

    It’s hard to be sure without seeing the antennae, but it looks like III/IV is another chafer beetle, in the family Cetoniinae. There is a genus that is common across most of the US (Trichiotinus) that looks very similar, but I don’t know off hand if Trichiotinus is present in eastern Europe. I may do a little poking around later today.

    Nice pictures!

  10. 17

    Interesting. In English, “chafer” is an old Germanic word for “large beetle” that seems to have mostly fallen out of use, except as part of the common name of a few species like “cockchafer”. It was resurrected in the early 19th century by English naturalists who had thousands of insect groups to name and were desperate for synonyms for “beetle”. As far as I can tell, it’s used today to refer to any of a rather odd, and mostly leaf-eating, subset of the scarab beetles (family Scarabaeidae).

    As it happens, the beetles in this post are both called “chafer” (in English), but not in the same way. The beetle in III-IV is a member of a subfamily that are all chafers (subfamily Cetoniinae, the flower chafers) but the ones in V-VII are called May beetles or junebugs by group affiliation, and “cockchafer” at the species level. Many of their close relatives (e.g. the Japanese beetle) aren’t called “chafer” at all.

    I’d wondered about the etymology before: the English verb “chafe” is a reasonable description of their feeding style, especially as larvae, but it applies equally well to lots of other beetles that aren’t called “chafer”. (As an aside, it doesn’t apply very well to bugs (order Hemiptera.) Bugs tend to feed by poking holes in things, rather than by chewing or scraping.)

    Heh. If this insomnia thing sticks around, I might start blogging again.

  11. 18

    A few other beetle/bug tips:

    The mouthparts are very different, if you can get a good look at them. Beetle jaws are all variations on the theme of “pliers” (or scissors, or tongs, or what have you: opposing appendages that damage whatever’s caught between them.) Bug mouthparts are more like straws.

    Beetle antennae can be ridiculously complex, with a dozen or more segments and what appear to be complex branching patterns. Bug antennae are usually much simpler: they almost always have five (only five, and exactly five) tubular segments of approximately equal length. If selection favors beetles with longer antennae, you get beetles with more antennal segments. If selection favors bugs with longer antennae, you get bugs with longer segments. (Of course, there’s probably a beetle somewhere with five tubular antennal segments. There are a lot of beetles. But it’s a reasonably good rule.)

    If you see them in flight, the front wings of a beetle (the elytra) are opaque and held rigidly out to the side. They may even function as airfoils (like airplane wings). The hind wings are transparent, and flap rapidly in the usual insect way. (At rest, the hind wings are folded beneath the fore wings, so you only see the hard outer shell.) Bugs fly by flapping all four wings, which are all partially or completely transparent. (Obviously this doesn’t work for flightless species.)

    Finally, their life cycles are completely different. Juvenile bugs look kind of like adults, but smaller and without wings. Juvenile beetles look *nothing* like adults (most are grubs.) That’s not very helpful for identifying a solitary adult, but can be helpful for species that live in aggregations where individuals in different life stages live together.

  12. rq
    20

    Wow, thanks for that info!! I’m curious to see if the German Käfer is a blanket term for both bugs and beetles, or maybe a certain kind of insect in general, instead of just beetles.
    So what does the ‘cock’ part in ‘cockchafer’ mean, then? Where does that bit come from? I mean, it’s obviously not the obvious… :P

Comments are closed.