Who AM I

Here is an interesting image from today. Who can identify what Order and what family this insect belongs to.  I will tally the answers in a few days.

  The insect was found on Gooseberry Neck, Westport, Massachusetts

E-mail your answer  mborn@photobee1.com

Beautiful Tiger Beetle (Cicindela formosa)

Beautiful Tiger Beetle (Cicindela formosa), Just finished eating a lady beetle

As I have previously stated, when you are out and showing the great outdoors, keep your eyes open because you've never know what you will find.  Doug and I were out birding yesterday along the beach loop at Allens Pond, when we noticed some fast-moving insects, running along in the sand.  Because my interest.  This day was photographs of birds.  I was utilizing my Nikon D 800 with my 70-200 mm F/2.8 lens with a 2X converter on it, and was not carrying a macro lens with me.  I utilized my camera lens combination, entered a 1.5 crop factor which gave me a focal length of 600 mm.  With the camera and lens on a monopod I took the photographs of the beetles.  After researching, I determined that the beetle was a Beautiful Tiger Beetle or otherwise known as a Big Sand Tiger Beetle.

Tiger beetles apparently a one of the most popular and most studied beetle groups in the world.  There are 2700 different species described.  They live from high elevation alpine forests to tropical rainforests, deserts to beaches.  Each species occupies a narrow a highly special ties habitat.  Tiger beetles are highly predatory and feed on a variety of insects and spiders.  An interesting fact is that they can run faster than any other known insect.  A quote "Some species have been clocked at over five miles per hour, which may not seem blisteringly fast, but in terms of body size, this makes them almost ten times faster than Olympic sprinters. "

Beautiful Tiger Beetle (Cicindela formosa)  A Pair of Beautiful Tiger Beetles Mating

White-spotted Sawyer (Monochamus scutellatus)

While I was in Yellowstone, I didn't photograph only large animals and the beautiful landscapes, there were a few interesting insects that needed photography..
The first was a Long-horned Beetle.  Nowadays, the worry in the East is about the Asian Long-horned Beetle, and in fact, the beetle that I found has been misidentified as the Asian Long-horned Beetle.  It Is the White-spotted Sawyer (Monochamus scutellatus).  While the Asian Long-horned beetle attacks hardwoods, the whites-spotted Sawyer utilizes weekend or recently dead conifers, freshly cut pulpwood, and saw logs.  Its range is from new fluent southward to North Carolina, then westward from the Atlantic coast to the North Central states to Minnesota are an northwestward up into Alaska.
One of the identifying marks for this beetle are the small white spots at the base of the wing covers.  The males are almost always completely shiny black and the females color can be mottled due to several white spots scattered over the wing covers.  The males and tenor are twice the body length, while those of the female are slightly longer than the body.
The lifecycle can take up to two years to complete, depending on the location of the country that the insect is in.  Egg laying starts in early June and into July and continues until early in September.  The larvae hatch after 9 to 14 days and then the larvae tunnels through the inner bark to the cambium within three days.  As the larvae increase in size, its galleries become wider and deeper.  The larvae will overwinter in one of these tunnels.
The Sawyer that I photographed, was easy to find, since it landed on the shirt all one of my fellow participants.