Stag beetle

[Both types of stag beetle can fly, but the female beetles do so less often than the males - Michal Fuglevič, Alamy stock photo]

Yesterday evening we had a large, male stage beetle buzzing about a neighbouring garden for a while. Massive great thing and the claws (or perhaps horns) were clearly visible when the angle was right.

Search suggests that we had seen them before in 2010 and 2011 (reference 3) and then again in 2019 (reference 4). So quite a rarity, not that we go around looking for them.

A 'File Explorer' search of the archive turned up 28 results, but inspection revealed that most of these had matched 'stag' to words like 'stage' which was no use at all. A search which perhaps parsed to: 'give me all documents which, considered as a case-blind string of characters, contain both the sub-string 'stag' and the sub-string 'beetle', that is to say without regard to word boundaries. Not what was wanted on this occasion at all.

Noting in passing that the 'case blind' bit means that the chip doing the work has to do rather more than just test whether two characters are equal. On the upside, an upper case letter is separated from its lower case equivalent by a fixed offset in the list of Unicode characters. While on the downside, if we were French or otherwise foreign, there would be the whole question of accents to worry about.

Back with beetle, Bing search for Fuglevič turned up quite a lot of stuff, which did not appear to include a personal website but which did include reference 5. He appears to be something of a specialist in insect photography.

I suppose the snap above is a female something attending to its young. Or is it collecting its dinner?

I close by wondering why evolution went to the bother of having these large but short lived adults at all, which do not live much longer than the short time needed to breed. Surely one could have achieved the same result with much less effort? And why bother with the wing cases? One could see more point if they stuck around for a bit longer.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_beetle. The short story.

Reference 2: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/stag-beetles.html. Something more substantial, with some striking pictures. The source of the first snap above.

Reference 3: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=stag+beetle.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=stag+beetle.

Reference 5: https://www.megapixel.cz/rozhovor-michal-fuglevic-jak-fotit-detail. The source of the second snap above.