"There's lots and lots of beetles..."

This rove  beetle (I like to think it's a female) I captured and kept in a bowl for a few days to study. Then I found the bowl had partly filled with rain water and she was clinging to the side to keep from drowning. When I released her (feeling guilty) she spent several minutes carefully wiping herself dry, using her second and third pairs of legs to reach up and across her thorax and abdomen before scuttling out of sight.

Rove beetles are a vast family containing over 60,000 species worldwide, adapted to every possible habitat including the seashore. They are almost all predatory on other small invertebrates. Some species have  evolved to live symbiotically in ant colonies, looking, smelling and behaving like the ants that are their diet.

A.A.Milne wrote a famous poem about a little boy who keeps a beetle in  matchbox until 'Nanny' looks for a match and accidentally lets it go. The  world's foremost researcher on the evolutionary transformation of rove beetles into ant look-alikes is being done by a Welsh entomologist who was just such a boy. Obsessed with insects from the age of seven, Joe Parker's bedroom in Swansea was filled with all sorts of tropical creepy-crawlies and he naturally enough went on to study insects at university. Now he's an entomologist  at Caltech in the USA and there's a nice short video here in which he describes his passion  and the research he's doing on his favourite rove beetles.