I want to find rhino beetle,but I have never seen them in life and there are no evidence that they are where I live or even not.like you can’t say they don’t cause I barley go out and I’m finding new insects everyday,but becoming more and more disappointed at the time.
I want to make it clear that they aren’t many datas for my city in inaturalist.
So what to do?Is there any way?Any site,any opinion on inaturalist or any signs that makes it clear that they aren’t there?I will thanks if you give me the answes you know:)
Rhinoceros beetle means different species in different countries. In Britain it is Sinodendron cylindricum. So which country are you in and which species are you looking for?
Hi, Oryctes elegans is associated to date palms, so its presence in your area is probably conditional to palms being present first. If no palms, probably no beetle.
Here in Central Botswana, I have a very large compost heap for garden rubbish like fallen tree leaves and kitchen scraps ( about 4 cubic metres). The compost gets warm and full of woodlice. As it changes into something like soil, I get large numbers of large dynastinae larvae and pupae which I am able to rear to adulthood. The compost seems to attract the rhino beetle which then lay eggs. Here in Botswana we call the rhino beetle larvae , dithethe and they look appetising and yummy. Why not make a big compost heap and see if this observation can be replicate? The rotting heap may have a smell that attracts rhinos from afar. I also find that in Botswana many dynastinae species are strongly attracted to a uv lamp, even in cool wintry nights.
There’s always some uncertainty, the best you can do is guess a probability from all the information available and then try your best to find them in locations with higher probability.
Especially nowadays, where a species from anywhere can end up anywhere else by accidentally hitchhiking on a boat or airplane, and where species are naturally expanding to areas they weren’t in before due to the changing climate, it can be difficult to tell.
Unless the photo of the organism shows clear morphological identifiers of a certain species, strictly speaking, it could well be a lookalike. Since this sort of ambiguity is not useful at all, we go by probability. In an area where 100 observations of species x₁ have been made, and 0 of the lookalike species x₂, then it is very likely that your observation is also of species x₁. However, at some threshold the probability becomes too low and we cannot reasonably assign a finer ID to the observation.
This threshold is on iNat mostly done based on “vibes” and what the person providing the ID feels like, and it’s not consistent between different identifiers nor different taxa. Some identifiers say if there’s more than one individual of a lookalike species recorded in an area, then no observations there should be IDed solely based on locality. Others believe, that a high ratio of the two species (maybe 95%:5% to 99%:1%) is good enough to have reasonable certainty that an organism belongs to the more abundant species. (There are problems with both approaches)
Working with wolf spiders, I learned to consider several additional things:
Spotlighting, mothing setups, baiting etc. makes critters easier to find. I’m not sure what attracts the beetles, but maybe there is something.
Many critters exist in microhabitats. Knowing the particular target species well can help.
Seasonality is important. I characterized a new species entirely by observing juveniles after sunrise. I wasn’t very knowledgeable back then and was surprised to find I’d entirely missed the adult stage because they became entirely nocturnal.
I use iNat heavily to determine where and when to look and Google maps satellite view to find accessible areas with promising habitat.
