A Cheetah with Six Legs

This unassuming Omus californicus tiger beetle is a fearsome hunter, provided you are ant sized. Tiger beetles are some of the top insect predators. As the world’s fastest insects, they’re actually a lot more like cheetahs than tigers. They hunt by running extremely fast across the ground, charging at prey with their mandibles open. They need open ground without a lot of vegetation to hunt by charging around: places like sand dunes, mudflats, and sandbars.

These habitats tend to be patchy and naturally ephemeral, so tiger beetle species are patchily distributed. Many are rare and under-researched. This specimen is one of the insects preserved by Schlinger Chair of Entomology Alex Harman, PhD, at Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Dr. Harman just published research on light attraction in North American tiger beetles, information which could help efforts to estimate the size of rare and hard-to-find populations.