Pairing up wild caught beetles

C

chocostarke

L1
Hello there,

How does one pair up wild caught beetles? Its easy to differentiate the males but females of certain species look the same to other species. For example, cyclommatus metallifer female and a cyclommatus elaphus female.

could anyone advice on this?

 
Usually there are small differences between two species, although sometimes it literally comes down to genitalia to discern them.

 
Such larger stag beetle species can be distinguished easily especially when they are not subspecies belonging to the same species group. A genitalia is one of morphological characters to define a species, but there sure are a lot of different ways to differentiate species. I'm not a Lucanid specialist, so I don't exactly know the keys to differentiate among Cyclommatus, but determining scarabs can be based on small to large body parts in size, shape, proportion, types and density of punctures/hair/tubercles, etc.

 
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