How can there be so many common insects that are seen so rarely? I've wondered that a number of times when I come across a bug I have never seen before. Like the assassin bug posted a few days ago. How often do you see one of those?
Last summer I happened upon a dead squirrel on the edge of the yard. It appeared to have missed a branch and fell to it's death. It happens. If there are no intervening branches for it to catch on the way down, its over. That is what appeared to happen to this one. But, what caught my attention was that the body was crawling with what I at first thought were bumble bees. It took me a minute to realize they were not bees at all, but something else. I had never seen a bug like this before.
I was doing something else and didn't want to take the time to photograph them right then, so I determined I would come back the next day. That was a mistake. Who would have thought they could reduce an entire squirrel to fur and bones in one day? By the following day, there were only a couple of carrion beetles left.
The club-like antennae have receptors on the ends (which you can pretty well see) which can pick up the scent of a dead animal - or even things like decaying mushrooms or dung - an draw them in from some distance.
The bottom line, though, is in all my years (and, no, I'm not saying how many that is), I had never seen this common insect before.
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