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Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Pattern in the sand -- Part 2

Okay, remember the mystery tracks that I posted last night?  I'll reveal the animal that made them in the photo below this one:



We followed the tracks until we got to the end, and this is what we found:



A rain beetle (Pleocoma sp.)!  It makes sense, because this was 24 November 2018 and it had rained the two days prior to this.  But I'm not sure how often these beetles are seen at the beach?  (We noticed several that night.)

Here's the beetle in Eric's hands. This is a pretty large beetle, but the width of the tracks in the sand is due to the reach of the beetle's legs:



An even closer view showing the wonderful antennae:


I wrote about rain beetles back in October of 2013 (when I was at a meeting at ~6000 feet elevation).  If you'd like to learn more about these intriguing beetles, check out the post called "Triggered by rain (or snow!)".

And here are more of its beautiful tracks:


2 comments:

Bill Wolpert said...

We saw 3 or 4 at The Sea Ranch last weekend. It was the first time I had seen a rain beetle. I thought it was similar to a June bug (which I have not seen in years).

Alice Chan said...

What a wonderful mystery that was!