White Spotted Pine Sawyer and web design suggestion

danielj

July 27th, 2006 at 12:00 am

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Identity of a Longhorn Beetle
Please take a look at the attached photo and tell me if it is a good enough photo to identify the beetle. We discovered it on our camping tent at 8:00AM on July 22, 2006, at the top of Table Mountain, at 6400 feet elevation, in central Washington State. Shortly after this photo was taken, the beetle flew away across an alpine meadow. There were conifer trees at the edge of the meadow. It was 2 to 3 inches long from the head to the rear end. I don’t know whether to call it a Whitespotted Pine Sawyer (Monochamus Scutellatus) or a Giant Root Borer (Prionus spp.) but I would prefer to know your opinion.
Your web site is awesome, by the way. It would be nice if the bugs were ordered in some way, and with fewer photos on each page (or something) so the page would load quicker.
Jim Zimmerman

monochamus scutellatus jim White Spotted Pine Sawyer and web design suggestion

Hi Jim,
Your beautiful beetle is a male White Spotted Pine Sawyer, Monochamus scutellatus. The Prionids are much stockier beetles. We are somewhat amused at your suggestion that we reorganize our site. First, our photos are “ordered in some way”. They are chronological. If you look at our 9 beetle pages, Beetles 1 is the oldest and Beetles 9 the most recent. We have individual pages devoted to specific groups of insects. The homepage has recent and timely postings. For example, we always have a House Centipede, a Potato Bug, a Toe Biter and a Pseudoscorpion on the homepage as we get so many requests to identify them. Suggesting that we restructure our page is comparable to walking into someones 50 acre, overgrown English country style garden and complimenting it, but suggesting it would be much nicer if it was redone as a formal, symetrical space. At this point, due to the size of our database, any restructuring will be the job of our archivists.