Rove beetles

One of over 3000 species of rove beetle in North America.

Identifying insects can be anywhere from easy to downright nasty.  Getting them down to their order level tends to be simple enough.  A dragonfly is, after all, very different from a butterfly or grasshopper.  Refining this further becomes an exponentially increasingly difficult prospect.  Hold on to your horseflies.

Pick up a book on insect identification in your area; Lone Pine produces some wonderful examples.  There may be something like 120 different insects listed, each one fairly easy to identify in its own right.  Monarch butterfly, Giant water bug, Stump-stabber - all insects that have very distinguishable features.  Chances are there are thousands of species in the same area that are not represented.  For example, one of these books lists two species of rove beetle of the dozens or hundreds that reside there.

My Field guide book to the beetles (Peterson) has 31 diagrams of different rove beetle species.  Although this sounds impressive, it represents less than 1% of all the species present in North America.  My favourite go-to book is Kaufman's Field guide to insects of North America.  It devotes a page to the family (Staphylinidea) and illustrates 14 different species.  All tolled, there was not a single reference to the particular species I photographed.

The closest I could come to identifying the insect was to determine its sub-family.  It belongs to the Paederinae, a group of rove beetles that has a distinguishable neck between the thorax and head.  Generally, they are considered helpful as they eat insects and invertebrate pests or are detritivores.  That's good to know.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com