Thursday, May 2, 2013

Do xanthopygine rove beetles eat fruit?

It's been a long time since the last post, but I was out for good reasons: end of the semester craziness, grading a mountain of exams, working for a three letter (scientific) government agency and on top of all  these a sick child. Now I need to start the paper writing machine for the summer.

I have been uploading several video clips of rove beetles on figshare and you can see many of those here Almost all of those are from my graduate school days and were shot on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, either in 2000 or 2001. I used some of the data to write a paper on Nordus fungicola natural history (a link to the paper is here).

Here is a clip of another Xanthopygine rove beetle (Xenopygus analis) munching on rotten Gustavia superba fruits. Almost all xanthopygine rove beetles are considered to be carnivorous, but I guess there are always exceptions out there.



                                             http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.693731

Here is a more typical example of feeding behavior,  a male Nordus fungicola stealing a prey item from an ant (no idea what this is) and then proceeding to chew (technically speaking, this is extra oral digestion) the fly larva. 


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