Black Carpet Beetle - Attagenus unicolor In Westwood; elevation 5100ft, Lassen County, California, USA June 25, 2006
Although these images are of poor quality, I thought they might still be of interest.
I raised this carpet beetle from a larva to the adult stage. The larva was collected on September 29, 2005. It lived for quite some time in a jar. I fed it with dead grasshoppers and some other sources of food. One day it was just gone! Perhaps it was within one of the dead grasshoppers that I put in the jar for food. So I Just waited. On March 9, 2006, about five months later, it reappeared in the jar; so I cleaned out the jar and tried some other food types (one dead skipper butterfly, some cooked rice, and a tuff of hair pulled from the dogs heavy winter coat, and some dried dog food.) In early June 2006 I noticed that it had turned into a pupae. By the end of June I had this adult carpet beetle.
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Contributed by Jim Moore on 29 April, 2011 - 1:23am Last updated 2 May, 2011 - 12:05pm |