In topic: "Favorite bugs? Any other kind of unique critters welcomed. "

Wednesday, August 13th, 2025, 5:00 AM23 days ago

While I'm biased towards the Eastern Hercules Beetle (Dynastes tityus) because I've owned one and it will forever be my beloved, my favorite in regards to yap about will be anything in the Order Strepsiptera! They are such mysterious little parasitoids that I even did one of my senior research papers on! Photos pulled from Wikipedia with OP's credit!
Herc Beetle: By David Hill - xIMG_0258, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41175425

Strepsiptera: By Dongmin Keum, Kyung-Won Jang, Daniel S. Jeon, Charles S. H. Hwang, Elke K. Buschbeck, Min H. Kim & Ki-Hun Jeong - Fig. 1: Natural Xenos peckii eye and the biological inspiration for the ultrathin digital camera. in Dongmin Keum, Kyung-Won Jang, Daniel S. Jeon, Charles S. H. Hwang, Elke K. Buschbeck, Min H. Kim & Ki-Hun Jeong: Xenos peckii vision inspires an ultrathin digital camera Light: Science & Applications volume 7, Article number: 80 (2018), CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=124543451


A close up shot of a male Eastern Hercules Beetle (Dynastes tityus) on a wooden substrate. It has a beautiful, yellow carapace with brown spots that ombres to a deep black.



A close detailed shot of a Strepsipteran (Xenos peckii) that has been scanned with an electron microscope. While in greyscale the image shows the highly unique and detailed exoskeleton, eyes, and antennae.



Voted #1 Scalemate Connoisseur by absolutely no one ⋆˚☆˖°⋆。° ✮˖ ࣪ ⊹⋆.˚

botanicalCanopus