Bugs of the World

The tiny Central American nation of Belize is famous for scuba diving and sport-fishing, and there are many people who come to lie on its beaches or investigate the main Maya sites.

Others come in the largely forlorn hopes of seeing a jaguar in the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary, but few realize what a wealth of insect life lives in the mainland jungles, like this comical-looking weevil, just one of many beautiful beetles to be found here.

Of course not every bug here is so attractive!

This scorpion with babies on its back was hiding under a pillow in the bunkroom where I was staying at park headquarters in the Rio Blanco National Park, in the far south of the country.   Other inhabitants of the building included a small posse of bats and a kissing bug, which often carries a deadly parasite which causes the incurable Chagas disease.

Many of the national parks aren't accessible, but a few like Kep on the south coast are very easy to go into.

Kep has a lot of wildlife, including mammals like monkeys, civets and bats, but it's also particularly rich in moths, including spectacular lime green moths called emerald moths and a variety of owlet moths like this beautifully marked Peridrome orbicularis.

As well as being a mecca for bird watchers, the small nation of Costa Rica is also a hotbed of diversity in the insect world, with around 1250 species of butterfly, 500 species more than the entire United States.

And although Costa Rica's proximity to the United States makes it one of the most visited eco-tourism destinations and also a favorite of ecological study, it's still possible to capture on film critters like this caterpillar in the tarchon family which hasn't been scientifically classified yet.

As well as dragonflies and damselflies for the odonatologists, there are some nice butterflies, moths and caterpillars to keep the lepidopterists happy.

There are many colorful and interesting beetles to see, such as tiger beetles, tortoise beetles and ridiculously large rhinoceros beetles.

As usual in the tropics, weird and wonderful is the order of the day, and few things can be more weird or wonderful than this Duliticola hoiseni "trilobite beetle" larva.   The females stay as larva their whole life, but the males eventually turn into a more typical looking net-winged beetle, only one tenth the size of the female.

Mexico's extensive natural areas have been severely ravaged by people, particularly in the last few hundred years.

There's isn't too much large wildlife to speak of anymore but there are still lots of attractive insects, like this gorgeous two-tailed swallowtail butterfly, one of many Butterflies of Central Mexico.

Quasimodo had nothing on this hunchbacked beauty, sucking on a delicious stem.

It's a variety of treehopper, all the more interesting because it was snacking in the middle of one of Mexico city's main thoroughfares.

My two week trip to the Philippines in 2006 was extraordinary because I failed to get a single photograph of a bird or of a butterfly.

However I did get quite a few photos of Philippines wildlife, including a fair number of interestingly shaped and colored true bugs, like this one.

There are a few critters which are definitely at the "creepy" end of the scale, including spiders, leeches and millipedes.

This millipede is the largest I've ever seen, measuring a good 20 centimeters from head to tail.

When I first visited Russia in 2005, the beautiful "peacock" butterfly was the only insect on my mind, and I was fortunate to see quite a few of them in the Moscow region, along with a few other butterflies and some interesting caterpillars.

Thailand is a wonderland for the bug enthusiast, with a profusion of beautiful butterflies, dragonflies and beetles.

But it also harbors a good share of insects and arachnids that most people don't regard so highly, like this giant forest scorpion I was lucky enough to run across one night.

The mainland United States might not be in the tropics, but it's so large and has such a wide variety of habitats that it can still support a very diverse collection of insects, including many interesting moths and butterflies.

Indeed the Monarch butterfly, a native of the USA, is probably the most well known butterfly in the world.

When I visited Vietnam I made special efforts to visit three of the national parks - Cuc Phuong in the north near Hanoi, Bach Ma in the center of the country near the old imperial city of Hue and Cat Tien in the south near Saigon.   All three of these parks are excellent places to see the colorful and amazingly patterned insects of all kinds which are such a typical part of life in the tropics.

Before I left the country I felt disappointed about how few of Vietnam's butterflies I'd seen, but when I got home I realized that I had more photos of butterflies than I'd collected on any previous trip, and it was the wealth of other fauna which had misled me.