This page is a cloud forest on the slopes of the Andes, where the trees stand in mist. Move your pointer and your bug will trundle, hover or flutter after you. Choose a different bug at the bottom, and tap the notes to open them.
The Andes of Ecuador right now checking the sky…
Counting the horn, a big male is the longest beetle in the world.
A long horn from his thorax and a shorter one from his head close together like a pair of tongs.
Males grip each other with their horns, lift, and slam the loser to the ground.
Its wing cases are yellow-green when dry and turn black when the air is damp.
The grub lives in rotting wood for up to two years, and can weigh more than 100 grams.
It can carry many times its own weight on its back.
Meet them all
Dynastes hercules
A giant beetle with olive-yellow, black-spotted wing cases. The male has a horn longer than the rest of his body.
Euglossa
A small bee that shines like polished metal, bright green or blue all over, with a very long tongue.
Greta oto
A small butterfly whose wings are as clear as glass, framed in brown with a white bar near the tip.
Diaethria
A small butterfly. With its wings closed, it shows the number 88 in black on white, below a band of red.
Megaloprepus caerulatus
A giant damselfly with a pencil-thin body and long, narrow wings tipped with dark blue and white.
Acrocinus longimanus
A black beetle patterned with red and yellow-green zigzags, with very long antennae and enormous front legs.
Through the year
Cloud forest is cool and damp all year round. All of these can be found in any month. The bug following you is shown in red.
Good to know
The trees comb water out of the passing cloud. Even when it is not raining, everything drips.
Every branch is loaded with moss, ferns, orchids and bromeliads, and each of those is a home for insects.
Bromeliads hold little pools of rainwater between their leaves. Damselflies and frogs breed in them.
Many orchids here can be pollinated by only one kind of orchid bee.
Because each mountain is cut off from the next, a large share of the insects on it live nowhere else.
As the climate warms, the cloud lifts higher up the mountain. Insects that need it must move up, until there is no more mountain.
South American bugs: 1 more place
Real photos of the bugs on this page. Tap one to see it bigger.
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons and are used under free licences. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews. Open a photo to see who took it.
Cloud forests cover only a sliver of the Earth, but each valley has insects of its own. Many are known from a single mountainside.
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