Thorny

Tonight I'd like to present another in my occasional series: Invertebrates Who Are Auditioning for a Role in the Next Lord of the Rings Film. He's a beetle, but definitely one of the least beetly beetles I've ever met - in fact, even knowing that he's a beetle, my brain still keeps looking at this photo and thinking... Mouse? Lumpy mouse? Armoured mouse wearing some kind of Viking helmet? This is partly a problem of angle, of course (which is why I chose this angle), but I think that even if you look at the more normal, dorsal view in the extras, you'll agree that as beetles go he's quite unusual.

If you're an avid follower of my nonsense, you'll probably already have recognised him as a lesser thorn-tipped longhorn beetle, a species I first met and posted just a month ago. I hadn't seen one since, but this afternoon I swept this little guy from a thicket of knee-high maple saplings along one edge of the wild garden (memo to self: time to get the pliers out). I immediately spotted him in the net, though he'd withdrawn completely into himself, pulling all his legs under his body and laying his antennae flat along the sides, and looked - as British Beetles says - more like a small bird dropping than a living creature. I gently encouraged him back onto this sapling, photographed him, and then went off to do the supermarket order and left him to his own devices. An hour later, when I returned to check on him, I found him underneath the leaf, curled around the stem, and looking more than ever like some tiny, ignorable bit of dirt or debris.

Much less well disguised, despite his Lone Ranger mask, my Opilione of the day (who, by the way, is the male counterpart of this female) has gone up over on Facebook. As we're now well into Arachtober I almost posted him here, but in the end I couldn't resist the unbeetly beetle.