Weird and Wonderful Creatures: Mysterious metallic green beetle

Weird and Wonderful Creatures: Mysterious metallic green beetle

The blog has been pretty heavy on plants so here is a friendly little fellow I met a couple nights ago while I was at Malifa.

unknown Metallic green beetle in glass jar of seeds

One of my cousins Leatuse referred to it as a Talie because he has seen this type of beetle around the Talie tree (Binomial Name)

 

Metallic green beetle

I have seen these beetles around before but noone ever mentioned its name. I am not even sure if it is native to Samoa or an introduced species.

Metallic green beetle

I took it with me from Malifa to Alafua in order to photograph it and it was rather docile.

Metallic green beetle

At first I photographed it through the glass jar I had popped it in but eventually I realised that I could take it out and photograph it without any danger of it flying away.

Metallic green beetle. Side view

Although I was able to take some rather decent photos through the glass.

Metallic green beetle on its back (one leg is missing)

Don't worry it is not dead. Everytime it was handled too long it tucked its legs and feelers in and played dead. After a while it would start to stir and in the instance bellow started to do so even though I was holding it. Once I had all the photos I wanted I took it outside and released it.

Metallic green beetle

Incidentally I had a hard time photographing it because Pebble kept jumping onto the desk to investigate what I was doing. Naturally remembering his beetle mania I kept pushing him away because I did not want him to eat it and that kitten moves fast. He opperates on the sniff and snatch.
So unhappy was he with my not allowing him to get close the this intriguing specimen that he started to walk over the laptop keypad, push the screen down and pretend to rub his face against the desk lamp I was using to illuminate the bug. When I had rescued the lamp several times and gotten tired of his antics with the laptop I put him outside the room and closed to door to his very vocal displeasure.

Metallic green beetle

When I let it go I made sure that Pebble and all his clan of Ninja Cats were nowhere around.


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Additional information:

As I said I will be posting the photographs of the statues on another blog which will cover “A blog about art, sculpture, food, history, culture, literature among other things. Basically this blog will be a catch all for other topics that I cannot logically cover in my existing blogs:

·         Flora and Fauna - Plants and Critters (on plants, animals as well as gardening, conservation and environmental matters)

·         The Blood of  Souls (language, translation and etymology)

·         Whiskers on Kittens (Life with Kittens and Cats in general)