Six-Spotted Tiger Beetle

My first one! Woo hoo! Yes I am excited!

 

"While walking along a dry forest path you may see a flash of brilliant

green: an insect that may alight, facing you, some twenty feet ahead. If

you can creep close enough without startling it, you will discover that it

is a Tiger Beetle -- the kind that frequents woodlands -- with shiny

metallic-green wing covers, large eyes, long slender antennae or feelers,

and long sharp-toothed mandibles.

 

The tiger beetle is a hunter. It hides like a bushwhacker and feeds on

flies, other beetles, small grasshoppers and, sometimes, crickets. It can

fly as swiftly as most of the fleeter insects and, with its powerful jaws,

seizes its prey which is then dragged down into the bushes. There the

tiger beetle proceeds to drink the blood of its victim, after the fashion of

a weasel. Only the empty carcass is left and the bushwhacker soon goes

hunting again. It is among the most rapacious and greedy of insects -- it

is a "tiger"."

Done