The Nilgiri Foothills
View on the Mountains and Forest
The last weekend I had planned to go for a light trap collection into the foothills of the Nilgiris. It was a bit difficult to reach the place and took many hours, but last but not least I managed to get there without any greater troubles. The place I stayed in faced directly the rain forest and makes a great spot for light collection. Yet as I arrived during the day time, I checked the area around my place. As usual, it was not possible to go into the forest without a guide, so I skipped it. Some locals told me that elephants had killed about 15 people already in this year in the Bandipur area. I found many interesting dung beetle species, which are usually hidden in cows dung. I imagine it looks quite strange for the locals if a white guy is using a forceps to collect insects out of cow shit. Well, science deserves sacrifices, haha. And the result were some very colourful (red and green metallic) and horned species.
True bug and
another dung beetle
Anyways, the nature was truly great, many interesting bird species flying around, I even saw some wild green parrots. There were also many beautiful butterfly species, but they were very fast flyers, plus it was windy all the time, so I did not manage to take proper pics of them, sorry, next time…
Always on the
search, here for big spiders
I managed to encounter some nice grasshopper and mantis species, whereas the grasshoppers showed a very good mimicking of leaves and grass, as you can see on the pictures. There were also holes, the entrance of which was covered with silk, so I suppose there were bird spiders inside, but I did not manage to dig them out as the ground was very stony and I did not have the right tools to dig properly. On some trees nearby I found a very interesting Phasmidae species which was hiding on the tree bark and looked very unusual to me. If anyone of you can identify it for me, I would be very thankful. I took some of them and will let you know soon if keeping and breeding is possible on guava and other trees.
Cetonidae/Dynastinae larvae found under a piece of wood and a nice agama
I also checked some old and big pieces of wood and was quite surprised to find a very weird kind of Scarabeidae larvae. It looks like a hunting version of the type of larvae that we know from your breeding. It has very long legs and walks on these legs on the stomach and not like common larvae on the backside. It was also very aggressive and agile. Sadly I forgot to make a picture, but as they seem to be very common, I will sure get the chance again. I also found a nice larvae of Cetonidae, but as I had no box for it, left it, otherwise I would have tried out breeding until imago and see what would have emerged.
Moth mimicking a
leave and a perfectly disguised grasshopper
As it started getting dark, I installed my light trap on the first floor facing the jungle. At first I was really depressed because there was a power cut which took a few hours and I did not expect the energy to come back, but luckily it did. To summarize my collection, due to the weather I did not find any Lucanidae, as intended, but some nice Rutelinidae, which are brown in colour but with blue shades and some (what a surprise;-)) dung beetles again. The locals assured me that many Lucanidae and other beetles would usually be around and that they usually only fly after rain or before rain. As the sky was bright and clear it was bad luck for me. But as I mentioned before nature was really great and compensated for not catching any Lucanidae. I will continue my trials and hopefully the next report will be one that mentions Odontolabis versicolor, Prosopocoilus giraffa nilgirensis and all the other big beetles of South India. Yet, the pics of this trip turned out to be really great, so enjoy watching them.
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