Post your Insect shots
- Thread starter jdeg
- Start date
Bob Blaylock
Senior Member
Beetles have a complete metamorphosis, like butterflies. The juvenile form is a larva, which looks nothing like the adult beetle. The middle stage is a pupa, and from that emerges the final adult form.
That said, what you've posted here does not look like a beetle, at least not an adult form thereof. It could be the larval form of some beetle, or it could be some entirely different sort of insect. Whatever it is, I think it looks more likely to be a mature form of some insect that is not a beetle, than that it is a larval form of a beetle. It's definitely not a mature beetle.
Thanks for that. I am nothing if not iffy on bugs. I sent the pics to my campus bug guy, but haven't heard back.
Bob Blaylock
Senior Member
On looking again at your pictures, I think that the insect pictured there is a bug, not a beetle.
By “bug”, I mean a true bug, an insect of the order Hemiptera. The shape looks about right for a true bug, certainly more so than for a beetle. Beetles, by the way, are of the order Coleoptera. I do think this is an immature form, as it does not appear to have wings.
By the way, here's an interesting little bit of taxonomic information. True bugs, if they have “bug” as part of their common name, “bug” is treated as a separate word. For example, the stink bug, and the assassin bug. Insects that are not true bugs, if they have “bug” as part of their name, it's not treated as a separate word; it's appended to the rest of the name without an intervening space. For example, the ladybug or doodlebug or pillbug (which isn't even an insect at all).
A similar convention pertains to the word “fly”. True flies are of the order Diptera. A house fly is a true fly, as is a blow fly, a robber fly, and a crane fly. A butterfly is not a true fly, and neither is a firefly or a dragonfly.