Night Walk At MacRitchie Reservoir Park (8 Mar 2024)

 The weather was wet for the entire day but the rain stopped in the late afternoon. Wanting to test out my macro rig, I decided to take the chance of not finding any beetles, and headed to MacRitchie Reservoir Park. Here's a photograph of an interesting looking cricket. 

Darkling Beetle ~ 5 mm

Darkling Beetle ~ 3 mm

Darkling Beetle ~ 2 mm

Chafer Beetle (Apogonia expeditionis) ~ 10 mm

Fungus Beetle ~ 2 mm

Leaf Beetle ~ 10 mm

Chafer Beetle (Apogonia expeditionis) ~ 10 mm

Darkling Beetle ~ 3 mm

This trip was a frustrating trip as I was having issues with the flash triggering. Somewhere there is a loose connection that caused the flash to be triggered intermittently. The intermittent flashing took the fun out of the session and I decided to end the trip shorter than expected. Back to the drawing board. 

Surprise Find At Pasir Ris Beach (2 Mar 2024)

 I was at the Pasir Ris beach for a "me-time" to enjoy the sea breeze and sunshine, and little did I know that I will be stumbling upon a surprise at the beach.

While walking along a narrow stretch of beach as it was high tide, I came across a piece of drift wood. 

Out of curiosity, I overturned the drift wood and to my surprise, I saw two beetle larvae in the sand.

After picking up the two larvae, I started to dig around the area to see if there are any more other larvae. Lo and behold, I dug up another 5 larvae.

Here's a photo of a larvae with my hand for size comparison.

As like previous time Surprised Find From Changi Beach (17 Feb 2021), I am also not able to identify the type of beetles the larvae belong to. Nevertheless, looking closer at the larvae my guess is that they are Chafer Beetle larvae. 

I took the larvae back home as they will not survive in the sand for long. As I do not have any containers for keeping the larvae individually, I decided to put the larvae into a bin where I keep the composted soil from my compost bin. Hope they survived and turn into adult beetles in another few months time. The previous "unknown" larvae took about 4 months to turn into an adult beetle but if they are Chafer Beetle, the duration should be much shorter than Dynastes beetles (as in the previous "unknown" larvae). BTW, these larvae are different from the previous larvae found at Changi beach in that the previous larvae have hairy bodies and these larvae have smooth bodies.

That's all for now, stay tuned to see what these larvae will turn into.