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Project Noah Nature School
Family Chrysomelidae
~ 1 cm long
Found on rock wall at Machu Picchu Peru.
Spotted on Apr 9, 2004
Submitted on Mar 13, 2012
9 Comments
That's a nice beetle!
Nice! Wonderfulcolour!!!
Ashish, look at the tarsi of my beetle and compare it with the tarsi of any blister beetle. They don't have the expanded pads on their feet that the leaf beetles do. This is definitely not a blister beetle.
Its a kind of Blister beetle
Lovely contrast
Simply Beautiful!
Wow encantador color
Leaf beetle is the common name given to a wide variety of beetles in the family Chrysomelidae. This is a highly variable family (all three of the beetles I spotted at Macchu Picchu belong to it). Having worked in University insect collections for 11 years, I've seen the amazing morphological variation among the members of that Family in specimens collected all over the world. Unfortunately, I only spotted one of the orange and green beetles, so I can't say with certainty that it is either common in that species or a unique morph.
I thought leaf beetles were either all orange or all green, at least where I live. Does this species usually look like this?