True bugs of Tawau and Borneo
The Hemiptera — cicadas, shield bugs, assassin bugs, mealybugs and their relatives. Adults have two pairs of wings and every nymph has none.
Spans all three folders
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How this section is arranged
The insect pages are filed by wing count, in three folders. This is a field key rather than a classification — you can use it with the animal in front of you, before you know what it is. Click a folder below to see everything filed under it.
The folder describes what was seen in the photograph, not what the animal is.
A young bug with no wings yet, an ant worker, and a female scale insect that never grows wings at
all are all filed under 0_Wing/ — even though the adults of two of those groups
fly. Because a taxonomic group can therefore appear in more than one folder, the groups that span
the key are given an index that sits above the three folders and reaches down into all
of them. Those are marked below.
Groups that span the key
Three indexes sit above the wing-count folders because the group appears in more than one of them.
Stick insects of Sabah
Phasmatodea from sea level to 1,520 m. Each record gives the date, the place and the photograph, and states plainly how far the identification can honestly be taken.
Spans the key
Ants of Tawau and Borneo
Field records of Formicidae. Workers are wingless and only queens and males fly, so for an ant the wing count is a caste character rather than a species character.
Spans the key
Two pairs of wings
Beetles, butterflies, moths, bees, wasps, crickets, grasshoppers, mantids and
cicadas — filed under 2_pairWings/.
Beetles of Borneo
The largest and most diverse order of insects, the body armoured by hardened forewings. Includes a ladybird larva and a trilobite beetle from the Tawau district.
Butterflies of Borneo
The butterflies recorded on this site, with photographs from the Tawau district and beyond.
Moths of Borneo
Moths photographed across Sabah, including the Atlas moth — among the largest in the world by wing area.
Bees of Borneo
Honeybees in Sabah, including Apis dorsata, the giant wild honeybee that nests on high branches and cliff faces.
Wasps of Borneo
Including the fig wasps — among them Ceratosolen fusciceps, pollinator of Ficus racemosa — and a crown wasp with a 32 mm ovipositor.
The emerald cockroach wasp
Ampulex compressa — the wasp that disables a cockroach's escape reflex and walks it to a burrow as food for its larva.
Crickets of Borneo
Family Gryllidae — flat bodies, long antennae, jumping hind legs, and harmless. Related to grasshoppers and more closely to the katydids.
Grasshoppers of Borneo
Orthoptera photographed in the Tawau district and across Sabah.
Praying mantids of Sabah
The ambush predators of the forest edge, and the most extensively photographed group in this section.
Cicadas of Borneo
The insects behind the afternoon and evening chorus of the Bornean rainforest.
Nerve-winged insects
Neuroptera — the lacewings, antlions and mantidflies, named for the fine mesh of veins across the wing.
Hister beetles
Family Histeridae — small, hard, shining beetles of carrion, dung and decaying wood.
One pair of wings
The true flies and mosquitoes — Diptera — filed under
1_pairWing/.
The Asian tiger mosquito of Sabah
Identification, behaviour and disease transmission — and how to tell a male from a female. The male has feathery antennae, lives on plant nectar, and does not bite.
Flies of Borneo
The general fly index. The individual families recorded on this site are listed below.
Fly families recorded here:
No wings visible
Larvae, nymphs, wingless adults and wingless castes — filed under
0_Wing/.
Caterpillars
The larvae of moths and butterflies, several of them stinging species best admired from a distance.
Centipedes
Not insects but myriapods, kept here because they turn up in the same leaf litter and the same photographs.
Woodworms
Family Anobiidae — the beetle larvae that bore through seasoned timber.
Eggs of insects
Egg masses and single eggs found on leaves and bark, photographed before hatching.
Articles
Insects of Sabah — biodiversity, and where to see them
An introduction to Sabah's insect life and its value for nature tourism. Stick insects, praying mantids, the termite and cicada concerto, beetles, honeybees, the giant forest ant, Rajah Brooke's birdwing and the Atlas moth — with where to see them, and a photo gallery from Bukit Gemok and Semarak.
Insects and spiders of Kundasang
Photographs from Kundasang, in the foothills of Mount Kinabalu.
Elsewhere on this site
Spiders of Borneo
Indexed by family, habitat and river system — web-builders, hunters, harvestmen and scorpions.
Dragonflies of Borneo
Dragonflies of Sarawak, Sabah, Brunei and Kalimantan.
Damselflies of Borneo
An introduction to the damselflies of Sabah.
Fauna of Borneo
The parent index for all animal life on this site, including the mammals and other vertebrates of Sabah.