I'm still lacking hard drive space to upload my new photos. I went back through my archives and pulled out a couple from Costa Rica.

This beetle stayed with us in our beach house for a couple of days. I took over 100 photos of him, but unfortunately none turned out. This is probably one of the better ones. The beetle hated light and would immediately scuttle toward the nearest dark corner. It's hard to take a 1/20 second exposure of a moving creature, so I opened up the aperture to shorten the exposure time. The consequence of this was shallow depth of field... meaning I never really got all of the beetle in focus at once.

The beetle had so many interesting parts to focus on - the hooks on his legs, his anter-like antennae, and his fuzzy underside just for starters. I was eager to search the net when I got home to try to find out exactly what kind of beetle this was. The result was kind of anticlimactic: "Dung Beetle".