Small Cw For Animal Death - Tumblr Posts

Day 4 of posting cute critters we found on a field trip:

Stag beetles! Female is on the left and male posing like a queen is on the right. These beetles are big, but very slow and more or less harmless. They can give you a painful pinch, but only if you’re dumb enough to put your finger between their mandibles. I’ve been playing with these bugs all the time when I was a kid and they never bit me, but their little claws can scratch you a bit in my experience. These beetles have a very short lifespan of just few months in their adult stage. As larvae, they live in rotting wood and as adults they feed only on sweet plant juices. The adults have just one mission: to breed. Males fight each other with those huge mandibles and when they mate with a female, they die. Females live a little bit longer until they lay eggs and then they die. So often, you can find HUNDREDS of stag beetle corpses all over the forest floor. Some people inevitably call the animal protection services because they freak out by it, but it’s completely normal. We found this super cool corpse that ants ate most of, but they left the hard head. Absolutely metal!