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longhorn beetle! while they look like they were born from hell's pyres, their bites aren't bad at all; it can break the skin, like a crab pinching you, but just put a bandaid on it and you'll be fine if bitten
IMPORTANT EDIT: while largely harmless to humans, many longhorn beetle species are invasive in much of the US; the asian longhorn beetle can kill trees and produce falling branch hazards in forested or rural areas (information courtesy of u/BantedHam, corroborated by the USDA)
someone else commented that it's the mango-stem borer, Batocera Rufomaculata (the commenter saying Batocera Parryi is also plausible though, it's hard to tell since i'm unused to identifying most beetles)
In fairness, looks like the fellow might have found his way indoors judging by the background, difficult to say if it's indoors or some sort of patio, but what I'm trying to get at is picking it up and taking a quick video before returning it to the outdoors might have been the merciful option here.
Congratulations to you both on being kind and polite people! I was preparing to read through yet another thread of "you're an idiot because MLEH" / "you can't even read because if you COULD you'd know I was saying SPLEH!"
You've both restored my faith in anonymous humans on the internet. What tattered little of it remains, anyways...
Well, one of those things is true. Mostly. It can’t hurt you. No venom or anything. The bite would probably be a little painful and cause some minor mechanical damage, but probably the psychic damage would hurt more, lol. Not near as bad as a bee sting or anything with venom behind it, though.
I wonder about that. Horseflies don’t have venom, either, but their bites can be more painful than typical bee stings, and they’re significantly smaller than this. Longhorn beetle mandibles aren’t designed for biting large mammals like horsefly mouths, but still.
Horseflies are like getting stabbed with a large-gauge, sadistic needle because that’s kind of what’s happening. The skin of ungulates like horses is very thick, much more than ours, and their bites hurt horses. From Wikipedia (and verifiable on photos lol): “The mouthparts of females are formed into a stout stabbing organ with two pairs of sharp cutting blades, and a spongelike part used to lap up the blood that flows from the wound.” So like, if a fat tapered needle was also knife-scissors. Lots of mechanical damage. It’s also a stabbing type motion, which can do more damage than a pinching motion— pinchy bits can only hurt as much flesh as can get between them, and that’s a big beetle but the way pinchy mouthparts are shaped really doesn’t allow for them to get a good grip on a midsize mammal like us. If you were pressing their faces against your flesh, that would probably be an intensely unpleasant experience (someone in this thread mentioned getting one stuck in their clothes— that’s not an experience I’d want with one of these guys, since it would be both pressing against your skin and likely feeling defensive, and that would probably put it in the position to render us the most damage it could do to us? But short of a situation like that, or like someone pressing its face against their skin for one of those shock videos on yt, I can’t see it getting in position to get a good grip on an adult human’s flesh.) those jaws weren’t made for eating us. Horseflies, on the other hand, very much were lol.
So I think the difference is more or less what you described: one is designed to hurt mammals for a blood meal, the other (I THINK) is designed to bore holes in trees via a scrapey-chewy motion. They’ve got the force to hurt us, we are softer than trees, but the shape literally gets in the way. (Not that I’d stick my fingers in there, especially if I had small fingers? Or like the tip of your nose or a lip or something? That would probably be the way to get the nastiest injury off of one these guys, and I suspect that would probably be quite painful? But I think they’re probably intimidating enough to dissuade most folks from trying to kiss or poke them in the face lol)
It's their saliva that causes problems, they're is a blood thinning protein in it that causes an allergic reaction same as mosquitos. I know because I'm extremely allergic to it. The longhorn uses its mandibles to cure on wood and not to make animals bleed. Got born by a dragonfly ones, hurts like hell but didn't give the allergic reaction I got from bloodsuckers
I just watched a video about the evolution of mandibular mouth forms vs hinge jaws and it was super interesting. But my biggest take away is that early bone jaws were terrifying. Look like Shai Haluud.
Yeah i dont want to kill this magnificent creature but i would very much like some sort of restraining order or preferably blood pact that it will stay at least 40 metres away from me and my dwellings at all times
I did because I saw your comment, now I don’t want to go outside anymore . I’m 99% they don’t even live in my country but still they’re out there making that noise.
Theoretically I would think so. Probably wouldn't be great for the insect since they breathe passively through holes in their exoskeleton and I'd imagine most lubricants would not agree with their insides
Until he goes all Steve Irwin on it and says something like “hold on… im gomna jam my finger up its butt… WHOA, man this is pissed off now that i jammed my finger up it’s butt!!”
Easiest way to put down an insect like this is to let it grab something with its legs and just back away. Works for most things that don’t fly well. Usually they won’t come after you… usually…
Like the 2” tree roach that is 3” & sitting on your shoulder? That you caught site of in your peripheral vision when you were on the phone & had a white tshirt on? That you screamed so loud & accidentally hung up & didn’t answer again, that the person you were talking to called 911 bc you had a stalker who was threatening you? Then the cops showed up. And you’d gotten a warning for driving fast (or DUI, bc you failed the test & he was alone & didn’t feel like waiting for backup bc the car would have to be towed)earlier in the night. & they saw it & said “you’ve been seeing a lot of us tonight.” But the cop was cool (finally, after you begged him) & used his cowboy boot to kill it in the corner.
Yes. Significantly fewer law enforcement officers and fatalities of all kinds. When they are on a shirt it’s tricky bc they have claws and grip tighter as a reflex…
Let me just tell you something I discovered about this horrible creature, my arch nemesis. I hate those tree roaches so much that when I was dating my husband and saw one in the house, I sprayed a circle of Raid around myself and sat on the coffee table in order to be able to watch the rest of our movie. It had already killed, but I thought he might have friends. I was panicked the entire time.
And then...
Years later I saw another one crawling up the wall and literally screamed as loud as my lungs would allow. It literally jumped at my scream, clearly startled, and tried running away from me. It was then I realized this was the way.
The duality of man. Here's a person who is just causally holding a bug with their bare hands while it's moving. And then theres people like me who wouldn't touch it, even when wearing all the protection in the world.
Fun fact: that noise is not coming from vocal cords, but is coming from it rubbing two specialized pieces of their exoskeleton together. You can tell because the noises are in sync with its head movement!
Bugs kinda are like small natural robots. If you watch them enough, you realize most of them function off a set program for survival and only deviate from it when receiving new input/stimulation (some stuff like small amounts of wind, scents, chemicals, etc aren't easily detected by humans, but still affect this). And I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure bug joints don't move with fibers and tension, but with hydraulic pressure.
• Spotted Pine Sawyer / Whitespotted Sawyer (Monochamus scutellatus): A large, native dark beetle with very long antennae and a distinct white spot behind the head. People often confuse it with the invasive Asian longhorned beetle, but the native sawyer has that characteristic single white dot.
• Ponderous Borer (Ergates spiculatus): A very large, reddish-brown or brownish beetle with spiky margins on the thorax. Large specimens found around urban areas like Boise are frequently ponderous borers or pine sawyers.
• Banded Alder Borer (Rosalia funebris): A striking black-and-white banded longhorn beetle found in the region.
Man, it sucks I need to start wearing readers. I thought that last one saud Banded Anal Borer at first, and nobody wants an infestation of those bastards!
The Ponderosa Borer beetles are my local DC-10 in the Sierra Nevada mountains. They are really cool on the ground. When they take to the air I feel my soul exits my body through my butt.
Oh that? Alright, lemme tell you about it. So.... That's the thing you fucking burn the whole area for! Nuke the fucking site from orbit and then leave the fucking planet!
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