Indonesian bugs

Bugs of Indonesia

Although it's quite beyond my comprehension, it's nevertheless true that not everybody enjoys "bugs", in spite of the extraordinary variety of shapes, patterns and colors exhibited by these small marvels. It's easy enough for everyone to like butterflies like this one I photographed in West Bali national park, but some of the less cute critters drive people crazy. Since I don't want to be held responsible for anyone's descent into insanity, I've arranged this page in order of the cutest bugs to the freakiest, and you can choose the point at which you want to bail out!

I photographed quite a few attractive butterflies, but this page has limited space so I'll put those on a separate Butterflies of Indonesia page. Instead, let's immediately move onto their cousins the moths, starting with this weird apparition with clear windows in its wings. With these windows the wings look like a face with eyes, which is probably a ploy by the moth to scare away predators.

click here to open a new window with this photo in computer wallpaper format

I saw enough of these critters in my three week trip to Indonesia to put together an entire page of Moths of Indonesia. This one doesn't have interesting wings, but look at those antennae! This is a male moth, and those giant feathery antennae are its means of sniffing out the pheremones wafting from the female, which might be hundreds of meters away, or even more distant.

Although I spent an entire week in Bali and Java, all of the moths on this page come from a two day stay I had just outside the town of Tomohon in northern Sulawesi. This is one of the first interesting moths I encountered, it was on the ceiling of the small restaurant in the resort I was staying at. This extraordinarily patterned moth seems to be quite common in these parts, I saw 3 or 4 individuals in my time there.

This weird and wonderful looking thing is a plume moth, a member of a family which gets its name from its bizarre feather-like wings. There are about 1000 species of plume moth, with more species in a family called "many plumed moths" because they have 12 to 20 separate "plumes" making up the wings, instead of the 2 or 3 you see here.

The raised tail of this attractive caterpillar is a giveaway that it belongs to a family of moths called "prominents", which receive their name from a very prominent tuft of hair which sticks up from the back of the adult's forewings. Many adult prominent moths have no mouthparts and don't eat at all during their short adult life.

After butterflies, dragonflies like this one are usually the most socially acceptable type of bug in western society, though some people do needlessly worry about being bitten by them! Some have common names, but this attractive dragonfly has to struggle through life bearing only the scientific name Neurothemis terminata.

There are also many attractive species of damselfly, a close relative of the dragonfly. And if you thought that the dragonfly had a hard time with its name, then spare some pity for this wretched damselfly from the Ubud monkey forest in Bali, which has the moniker Rhinocypha fenestrata cornelii. Even his best friends resort to calling him "Hey you!". And yes, the claspers at the end of the abdomen do signify that this is a male.

One step downwards, but what a doozey! This blue-spotted tiger beetle is actually very attractive, but most people will probably only notice those giant bug eyes and the wicked looking jaws. It seems like those jaws have been busy, too, as evidenced by the small pile of insect shell on the ground, and a small trace on the beetle's left pincer, all probably the leftovers of an ant. An interesting feature of this species is the pale colored hairs on the bottom half of its front legs, which it probably uses as a brush to remove dust and grit from its eyes.

This coconut palm beetle belongs to the family of rhinoceros beetles, so named because of their size and the large horns on their head. Male rhinoceros beetles use these horns to fight against other males, which leads to a favorite game of children throughout Asia - organized rhinoceros beetle fighting!

This Atlas beetle is an even larger type of rhinoceros beetle, with truly awesome weaponry. This amazing animal can reach 14.5 centimeters in length, which makes it all the more astonishing when it opens its wing cases and flies away!

An attractive pair of weevils doing what comes naturally - eating and mating! There are more species of beetle in the world than any other category of animal, and more species of weevils than any other type of beetle, which I guess makes weevils about the most successful type of animal on the planet. With all of that eating and mating, and a complete absence of two-party politics, weevils are probably also about the happiest creatures on the planet. As you can see, the weevil community does suffer from a certain amount of voyeurism, but surely that's the lesser of two weevils?

OK, be like that then.

I'll move onto a different topic, but not too different!

These amorous critters are tortoise beetles, so named because of the tortoise-like shell which they can pull down very strongly to the surface of a leaf, thereby avoiding the attentions of predators such as ants.

These tortoise beetles are a very attractive gold color, some species can change color very rapidly when disturbed by adding or removing liquid from immediately under their shell.

This grasshopper is by far the most attractive that I've seen anywhere, with spectacular yellow markings and a bright red abdomen, all of which probably signifies that it tastes really bad! I found it at the Hindu temple Gunung Kawi on the island of Bali, along with some attractive dragonflies, butterflies and jumping spiders.

This conehead grasshopper doesn't have any interesting colors, but its shape certainly makes it noteworthy. It was on a stalk of grass next to a small river near the Buddhist temple of Borobodur, I walked along the river for a few hours at night using my flashlight to pick out all sorts of cool critters, including two varieties of snake! Although they're called grasshoppers, coneheads are actually a variety of katydid.

This mantis is another inhabitant of that Borobodur riverbank. Mantids are visual hunters, so it's unusual to see this fellow out at night, but maybe it was trying to sleep rather than trying to hunt.

This ant walking along a riverbed in West Bali national park has found a feather, which it's decided to take back to the nest.

I'm not quite sure what it expects to do with it back there, it can't be eaten and I can't picture an ant using feathers to build a bed!

From bugs to true bugs.

Although most people refer to any sort of creepy crawly as a bug, scientists use the term "bug" to refer to a particular group of insects, which is distinguished from other insects by the presence of a "rostrum", or sucking tube which is normally tucked under the head and body of the "true bug", and swung out at feeding time. Scientists use the term "arthropod" to refer to insects, spiders and the other critters most people think of as "bugs".

Some true bugs are carnivorous, catching beetles, caterpillars and other insects to eat, while many true bugs like this one suck the juices out of plants.

There are over 80,000 different species of true bug, this one belongs to the Cixiidae family of the Fulgoroidea super-family, the latter of which is more commonly referred to as "planthoppers". Remember these names well, because there's going to be a test at the end of this page!

This weird looking apparition belongs to the "treehopper" family of true bugs, some of which are shaped like thorns, and others of which have a crazily shaped "pronotum" on top of their heads, like this one. This individual was at the workers' camp a short distance below the volcanic crater lake Kawah Ijen. The workers who saw me taking photos of this bug thought I was crazy, until I showed them the photo and then they started oohhing and aahhing and looking around for it in the bushes, though by this time it had already bugged out.

I've seen a true bug like this before, in Malaysia, and I thought it was a type of cicada, but now I realize that it's actually a froghopper. When they're young they're know as "spittle bugs" because they sit on the stem of a plant sucking juices and surrounding themselves with copious amounts of bubbling foam, as a means of keeping predators away. And you thought you had an unpleasant childhood!

This comical looking creature with the oversized wings is another member of the planthopper family, this time in a sub-family with the tongue-twisting name "Dictyopharidae" (don't forget the test at the end of this page!).

This is probably one of the last bugs you want to meet, a juvenile stink bug - those four lumps on its back are the outlets of the stink glands, and it didn't hesitate to use them on me! The juveniles or "nymphs" of bugs are easy to recognize because they have undeveloped wings. As a bug sheds its skin and goes from "instar" to "instar", the wings become more and more developed until the final "instar" turns into the adult "imago".

OK, let's crank up the Fear Factor with some nice spiders, like this very attractive male lynx spider. There are 420 species of lynx spider in the world, they're distinguished by having six of their eight eyes arranged in a hexagonal pattern, and also by the large spiny legs they use to ambush passing prey. As with many other spiders, males are recognized by the bulb-shaped pedipalps in front of the head, which they use to siphon up sperm for mating with a female.

I don't know about you, but I find this lynx spider creepier than the last one, even though it's quite a bit smaller. The color is certainly unusual, but perhaps the creepiness is due to those two fangs sticking out under its jaws.

Like lynx spiders, jumping spiders don't build a web, instead they go out and hunt their dinner. Lynx spiders have adequate but not spectacular eyesight, but jumping spiders have excellent vision, allowing them to walk around their environment and actively stalk their prey, rather than waiting in ambush for something to come by. It's apparently a very successful strategy, since jumping spiders comprise the largest family of spiders, about 5000 in total, making up about 13% of the estimated 40000 spider species.

They're also some of the most beautiful of spiders with attractive, often metallic colors, like this tiny female guarding her eggs. They have great personalities, too - the two large main eyes which are a distinguishing feature of the family make these spiders look more engaging, and unlike almost all other spiders they'll actually turn and look at you. If they decide you're a threat then they will often move to the underside of the leaf they're on, otherwise they'll continue about their business, stopping from time to time to check that you're not doing anything nefarious.

This giant wood spider has beautiful colors and shapes on her body, but sheer size puts her into the "freakout" category for most people. This species is common throughout Asia, from Japan all the way down to Australia. They're harmless but seriously large, a full 20 centimeters from toe-to-toe! They make the largest web of any spider, up to 2 meters across, and the silk is even strong enough to trap small birds. The males are far, far smaller, measuring only 5 or 6 millimeters from end to end.

The giant wood spider is large, but this tarantula is just as big across with much fatter legs and far bigger fangs! I took this photo at night in Tangkoko nature reserve in northern Sulawesi.

The forest floor at Tangkoko was pretty much covered with dozens upon dozens of these millipedes.

Millipedes have the distinction of being the oldest known land animal, a 428 million old specimen turned up just a few years ago in a fossil bed in Scotland, which back then was in the tropics!

They're still going strong, with over 10000 species around the world, the largest being an African giant which reaches a length of 28 centimeters.

In this photo it's possible to make out two oval shaped structures just above the antennae called the Tomosvary organs, whose exact purpose is uncertain but is thought to be either detection of humidity levels or chemoreception.

You're not freaked out yet - what's wrong with you people? OK, here's my last shot. This is what I thought was a leech which I found in Alas Purwo national park at the south-eastern corner of Java. After being sucked nearly dry by leeches in Vietnam a couple of years ago, I was very cautious about them in Indonesia, however I didn't find this during the hours and hours I spent in the jungle, instead it was in my rented car when I was leaving! Turns out though, that it's not a leech, but a shovel-headed garden worm, which is carnivorous but not at all interested in eating me.

I dare you to check out the Cold-Blooded Animals of Indonesia, the Spiders of Vietnam, the Butterflies of Vietnam, the Bugs of Russia and the Wildlife of the Philippines!