''Lytta magister'', the desert blister beetle or master blister beetle, is a species of

blister beetle Blister beetles are beetles of the family Meloidae, so called for their defensive secretion of a blistering agent, cantharidin. About 7,500 species are known worldwide. Many are conspicuous and some are aposematically colored, announcing their ...

found in southwestern

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...

. Typically in length, ''L. magister'' has a striking red head, legs and prothorax, with black elytra. They can be found in great numbers in the Mojave and

Colorado Desert California's Colorado Desert is a part of the larger Sonoran Desert. It encompasses approximately , including the heavily irrigated Coachella and Imperial valleys. It is home to many unique flora and fauna. Geography and geology The Colorado De ...

s in spring, and are often seen in swarms.Arthur V. Evans, James N. Hogue. ''Field Guide to Beetles of California'', University of California Press, 2006. p229. Females lay eggs in holes in the desert soil. The

larva A larva (; plural larvae ) is a distinct juvenile form many animals undergo before metamorphosis into adults. Animals with indirect development such as insects, amphibians, or cnidarians typically have a larval phase of their life cycle. The ...

e are

insectivorous A robber fly eating a hoverfly An insectivore is a carnivorous animal or plant that eats insects. An alternative term is entomophage, which can also refer to the human practice of eating insects. The first vertebrate insectivores were ...

, mainly attacking

bee Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their roles in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyly, monophyletic lineage within the ...

nests.Floyd G. Werner, Carl E. Olson, Werner/ols, Carl A. Olson. ''Insects of the Southwest'', Da Capo Press, 1994. p122. They consume the immature host along with its provisions, and can often survive on the provisions alone, thus they are not obligatory

parasitoid In evolutionary ecology, a parasitoid is an organism that lives in close association with its host (biology), host at the host's expense, eventually resulting in the death of the host. Parasitoidism is one of six major evolutionarily stable str ...

s but rather food

parasite Parasitism is a close relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or inside another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life. The entomologist E. O. Wilson has ...

s that are facultatively parasitoid, or simply

predator Predation is a biological interaction where one organism, the predator, kills and eats another organism, its prey. It is one of a family of common feeding behaviours that includes parasitism and micropredation (which usually do not kill th ...

y. Adults feed on flowers and leaves of brittlebush. Though they are not venomous, they can in fact bite.

Gallery

References

Meloidae Beetles of North America Beetles described in 1870 Taxa named by George Henry Horn {{Meloidae-stub