Ok, well beetles have become a pain in my cloaka, it took me several hours to search various insect sites and databases looking for the name of this quite large weevil beetle. I learnt many new things about beetles that I was not really looking for example: weevils are the largest grouping of beetles.
I found this rather large beetle in the sand between the sandstone outcrops of Bastion Point in Mallacoota. It was at least an inch long and not overly worried by me point my long lens within a few feet of it. The closest I got to id’ing it was finding the Leptopius genus in the weevil family. Birds are so much easier to ID compared to all the insects out there. As the tide dropped many crabs started to scurry about and duck into cover as I discovered them. The most common one was the Purple Sand Crab officially know as the Swift-footed Crab with a latin name of Leptograpsus variegatus. Tonight as I was writing this post, I started to look into the latin meaning for lepto and why the coincidence of finding two sand creatures with similar latin names. I stopped as I was heading down another rabbit hole and I thought I would rather watch a bit of Netflix and relax.
Genus Leptopius (sp), Bastion Point, Mallacoota, Vic
Swift-footed Crab, Bastion Point, Mallacoota, Vic
The Gap Year and Beyond 