On the second day of our stay in Budapest, Yves, Sandor and I were joined by Nikola Rahmé, an excellent macro photographer who is gifted with an impressive knowledge of insects and who is specialized in Buprestidae (Jewel Beetles). His ecological knowledge combined with his technical skills and artistic talent, has led to one of the biggest collections of wonderful images of Buprestidae. Nikola helped us successfully in finding two much-wanted Carabus species: Carabus ullrichi and Carabus scheidleri. We spent our afternoon photographing the Carabus beetles in an open old forest around Pomaz, in the hills surrounding Budapest.
Under here an image of Carabus ullrichi, a beautiful and reddish coloured large ground beetle.
Carabus ullrichi is a central-european carabus species, which inhabits a very broad variety of habitats, from dry to wet, and from open cultivated land to large forested areas. Despite this eurytopic character the species is often uncommon, quite localised and difficult to find. It may occur in a tiny part of a large forest where it can be locally abundant, to quickly decrease in numbers in the adjacent forest habitat and be absent in most of the other forest parts. Which is quite contradictory to the fact that it can theoretically occupy a very broad range. Probably the local populations demand specific microclimatic and abiotic characteristics, especially during their larval stage, of which so far we don't know enough to explain the species' local absence or occurrence. Moreover the species can be very abundant in some place during one year, whilst the species seems to survive almost unnoticed during the next years. With all this knowledge in advance I was very uncertain of finding the species, and thus I was very happy that Nikola had found the species for us.
Most of the populations of this species seem to have suffered very severe declines during the past decades, probably mainly due to habitat loss and the intensification of the agricultural practices.
Under here, some images of two different beautiful colour morphs of Carabus scheidleri. A third image shows a Carabus scheidleri I photographed in Central Slovakia (Zvolen), which illustrates well the striking colour and pattern differences which can be found within one species.
The first two images, show the typical subspecies of Carabus scheidleri 'jucundus', which is found in the forested hills around Budapest. The subspecies shows beautiful colour variations with blue, greenish and reddish coloured to almost blackish individuals. The species also inhabits grasslands, pastures, and vineyards in the lowlands, but it is dominantly a forest species, mainly found in more open dry forest types.
Carabus scheidleri is very closely related to 'Carabus monilis', which is a West-European species mainly found in open habitat, as well as to the more restricted range species 'Carabus zawadskii' and 'Carabus hampei', both occurring more to the east. More to the south Carabus kollari is another closely related species. Recent DNA-analysis and study has revealed that some subpopulations of 'monilis' showed more genetic differences then the general genetic difference between the 'monilis' and 'scheidleri' or the 'zawadskii' populations'. Only 'hampei' seemed to show more pronounced genetic difference with the three mentioned species. So it seems that the definitive taxonomic decisions have still to be made within this Carabus complex...