staphylinidae
awild | March 19, 2010This week was warm enough to go insect hunting in the yard, so the Friday beetle is back with new material. I snapped a few shots of this little staphylinid under a brick, figuring I'd identify it later.
That turned out to be a more complicated process than I'd anticipated.
It's a member of the the subfamily Aleocharinae, the obscure rove beetles. To arrive at an identification any more specific than that is basically impossible. The late James Ashe wrote:
The seemingly endless diversity, the small size of most adults, and the virtual lack of illustrated keys and descriptions of…