Festive, blowout, dispirited, punctured, sexguttata. Tiger beetles can have crazy names as I learned when Ted Floyd tweeted his daughter’s photo of a blowout beetle. Who knew!? Here’s what five of these crazy beetles look like.
The festive tiger beetle (Cicindela scutellaris) is irisdescent and often two-toned as shown above and below. Sometimes they are completely indigo blue which would surely confuse me.
Blowout tiger beetles (Cicindela lengi) occur in the West, including Colorado. See Ted Floyd’s tweet.
Tiger beetles have cool names. For example, the Festive Tiger Beetle and the Beautiful Tiger Beetle. But this one takes the cake. It is the BLOWOUT Tiger Beetle. Could this be the coolest standard English name of all time?
— Ted Floyd (@BirdingMagazine) August 10, 2020
Seen Saturday near Denver. Photo by © Hannah Floyd. pic.twitter.com/b9g0RcztbF
Punctured tiger beetles (Cicindela punctulata) are found in much of North America including Pennsylvania. Also called sidewalk tiger beetles you’ll probably see one on a hard surface.
After a blowout when your tire is punctured you might be dispirited or depressed. There’s a tiger beetle for that …
Despite their name dispirited tiger beetles (Cicindela depressula) seemed pretty lively when Ken-ichi Ueda photographed this one at Lassen Volcanic National Park in August 2013. He wrote at bugguide.net, “These little guys were all over the path running southwest from the King’s Creek picnic area.”
And finally, a very common tiger beetle whose species name is “sexguttata”. In Latin that means “six drop.” The six-spotted tiger beetle (Cicindela sexguttata) is found eastward from Minnesota and south to Kentucky. They occur in Pennsylvania.
There are over 850 species of tiger beetles so I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of crazy names. Leave a comment to tell me about another one.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons and Ken-ichi Ueda on Flickr; click on the captions to see the originals. Tweet embedded from Ted Floyd, ABA)