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Photo#58709
Soft-winged Flower Beetle - Collops tricolor - male

Soft-winged Flower Beetle - Collops tricolor - Male
Woburn, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, USA
June 19, 2006
Size: 5mm
Pretty sure this is a soft-winged flower beetle, but what's up with thosse antennae? It was a hot day today in the 90's, and it looks like this beetle stuck a couple of ice cubes on it's antennae to stay cool.

Images of this individual: tag all
Soft-winged Flower Beetle - Collops tricolor - male Soft-winged Flower Beetle - Collops tricolor - male

 
Plus, if you look closely,
you can see another gender trait immediately under the image -- a male sex symbol ;-)

Moved

Was he able to move those aro
Was he able to move those around ok? I haven't seen anything like that before :0.

 
They seem to work fine
I've never seen that before either.

 
Male Collops sp.
This is a male Collops species. They use those bizarre antennae to grasp the female during courtship and mating, if I understand that correctly:-)

 
That's different
I can see where those blocks on the antennae could be used to hold the female. This has to be a Collops nigriceps, because it's identical to one I got in the same location last year, minus the wierd antennae.

Thanks Eric.

 
true colors
Tom, I'm just wondering if C. tricolor is a possibility? Keying from Dillon, and Downie and Arnett, I get C. tricolor from both - mostly due to the absense of any black spot on the pronotum. The description in Downie/Arnett seems to allow for this absense under C. nigriceps, but the key doesn't. That said, the descriptions of both species in both references have significant differences. And neither mentions much about "red", rather they talk about "yellow or yellow-brown", possibly due to the difference between these great live shots of yours and the long-dead examples they and others undoubtably used for descriptions. The EGRiley that orginally determined your previous shot probably does these a lot more than I ever will, but I just thought I'd ask. Amazing creatures.

 
Good points
Sounds a little confusing, with different descriptions and not mentioning red in the keys. For now I won't go against what EGRiley called it. Maybe Mike Quinn will see this and have a say.

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