Time to morph! (video inside)
*fweeng!*
*flies away*
This was a longhorn beetle that was going for a walk in my bedroom.
By now you must think that I had the scariest bedroom in the world, but I slept pretty peacefully there, and was never bitten by anything. Only once I woke up scared when a huge beetle flew into my hair and got stuck there, but that was a pretty harmless event.
Anyway, back to the video.
That *tap tap* sound you hear is not produced by the beetle, it was my mother playing with some paint cans. The *fweeng* sound was the beetle though, and I didn’t hear anything when I was filming, I was only able to notice it after I played the video.
This beetle’s species is difficult to know for sure, there are just too many beetles in this world (over 20,000 species of longhorn beetles alone!), and I admit that I am not very good at identifying beetles, so I usually just call it a Lamiinae or flat-faced longhorn beetle.
This was one of the few bugs that were ok to kill when I was little, not because it is dangerous to us, but because it causes massive damage in the backyard. My dad has a very dear relationship with his trees, and longhorn beetles are experts in cutting down tree branches.
You have to hand it to them, they do an amazing job. They start by chewing off a perfectly straight circle around the branch, then they continue to make it deeper and deeper until the weight of the branch breaks whatever is left and the branch falls.
Whenever I went outside and saw that a big tree branch had fallen, and upon closer examination it looked like a perfect saw cut, I was sure that I could look for a longhorn beetle and I would find one.
Don’t start to hate longhorn beetles just yet, they don’t do this just for fun, they need it! After the branch falls, they put their eggs in it, so the larvae can eat the wood. They’re just looking after their babies like anyone would.
Time to morph! (video inside) by The Bug Lady, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Tags: Arthropod, Beetle, Brazil, Brazilian, Insect, longhorn, pine borer
