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Tiger Beetle
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| [Note Guidelines] Photographer's Note |
Hello friends,
another 'unknown' presented here for you help.
This was very shy, an inch long,found under the bushes. They are seldom seen open. Found Crash landing on bushes and falls to floor to disappear. Luckily I got this when it was crossing a patch of clearing fast.
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Thanks to Ivan and Haraprasan for the ID.
Thin yellow band in the apical region and shapes of other two yellow bands were differant,so I was hesitant to choose 'Calochroa bicolor'.
Tiger beetles were traditionally classified as the family Cicindelidae but most authorities now treat them as the subfamily Cicindelinae of the Carabidae (ground beetles).
The most recent classifications, however, have relegated them to a subgroup within the subfamily Carabinae, though this is not yet universally accepted; accordingly, there is no consensus classification for this group, at any level from family down to subspecies, and it can be exceedingly difficult to decipher the taxonomic literature surrounding this group.
There are about 2,100 species known, with numbers ranging much higher or lower depending on the authority consulted. Very many were described by the German entomologist Richard Horn.
The tiger beetles are a large group of beetles known for their predatory habits. Some tiger beetles can run at a speed of 5 mph. For its size it has been suggested that they are technically the fastest running land animals. This has been featured on "Animal Planet's Most Extreme" show as the number one fastest animal known to man on earth.
Tiger beetles often have large bulging eyes, long, slender legs and large curved mandibles. All are predatory, both as adults and as larvae.
The larvae of tiger beetles live in cylindrical burrows as much as a meter deep. They are large-headed, hump-backed grubs that flip backwards to capture prey insects that wander over the ground. The fast-moving adults run down their prey. Some tiger beetles in the tropics are arboreal, but most run on the surface of the ground. They live along sea and lake shores, on sand dunes, around playa lakebeds and on clay banks or woodland paths.
Tiger beetles have been considered as good indicator species and have been used in ecological studies on biodiversity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_beetle
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