![]() ![]() ![]() I also had to chase the kids outside and barricade myself in the bathroom to get a low enough level of background noise that the beetle squeaks would be the loudest thing in the recording. Since the beetle was so quiet, I had to goad it into squeaking while it was pretty much standing directly on the microphone of the recorder I was using. This makes it vibrate, and if you hold it up to your ear, you can hear it making a faint “vip, vip, vip” sound. When it is picked up, it stridulates by rubbing its body segments together. In addition to looking, at first glance, like a bird dropping, it has another amusing feature. They weaken the stems of the trees they infest, and young trees in particular become likely to snap off in the wind. It chews holes in the bark of willow and several species of poplars, and lays its eggs in the holes, where the larvae spend a year or two burrowing under the bark and through the wood, pushing out little piles of sawdust. She thought it was a bird dropping at first until it moved, and now she calls it a “Poo beetle”.įrom the elongated snout, it is clearly one of the snout beetles in the family Curculionidae, and I think it is a “Poplar and Willow Borer”, Cryptorhynchus lapathi. ![]() Here’s a beetle Sam found on the side of the house on June 27, 2011. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |