Steve Cho

MA, USA

This is for a project I am doing...however, because I am a rising freshman, I am not an expert at ID'ing beetles!
I can get almost all beetles to family at least and many to genus, but I am not too good with the extremely small ones as well as some families (staph, carabids, curculionidae mainly). Help would be greatly appreciated!
Also, I know there are some of you who may not like the fact that the insects were killed and pinned...but they are for research purposes!
Please understand.

I have had a few people ask how I took my pictures.
I am glad that many of you find my pictures of good quality!
Here is how I take my pictures.
Fortunately, I work at a lab that has all these equipments at hand.
The main software I use is called AutoMontage.
It lets you take pictures with different focuses on a specimen at high magnification.
I am sure that at high magnifications, many of you notice that only one part is in focus.
What AutoMontage does is when you take multiple frames of a specimen, it automatically assembles a full picture from each focused slides.
Thus, the focused pictures even at high magnification.
The equipments are specially designed microscope with camera function attached to a computer.
Finally, if I want to clean up the pictures a bit, I use photoshop.
Although AutoMontage is not a free software, there are apparently free ones that work similarly but are slower...don't know the name though!

http://www.grotonarthropods.org