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In the 1970s, Stephen J. Roman was working as a juvenile corrections officer in the Houston area and hunting for beetles in his spare time. He was especially excited about tiger beetles, a diverse group of small, speedy predators with jewel-toned shells. Roman often spotted the eye-catching bugs foraging across the roads and salty soils near Sour Lake, an hour east of Houston. Guidebooks described the local beetle as Eunota circumpicta, the cream-edged tiger beetle. But the beetles Roman was seeing behaved differently and had different colors—enough so that he wondered whether he was looking at a different species. More than fifty years later, Roman’s suspicions have been borne out. In a recently published paper, the citizen scientist joined Rice University biologist Scott Egan, William Godwin of…

The post Undiscovered Insects Lurk in Plain Sight Across Texas. Meet the Newest: The Houston Tiger Beetle. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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