I’ve been spending time going through various online “insect identification” websites and haven’t found a match yet.
Location - SF Bay Area.
We’ve started to see a few of these little critters around/outside the house - I’ve smashed a couple in the kitchen and several on the front porch.
I don’t have a good photo but they are small (between 1/8" and 1/4" long), no wings that I can see. Tan with dark brown stripe(s) running lengthwise along the body (the cockroaches that I’ve seen in the bug websites have stripes running across the body, not along it).
Antenna appear to be small and forward-facing.
Smash them and there’s some blue guts.
They don’t seem to be scared of the light. I have an extremely blurry photo of one on the outside doorframe that I took this morning - it was quite happy there even with a bright porch light and the flash on my cellphone.
I try to keep the kitchen clean and dry but with a relatively new dog and family (incl. 9-yo stepson) it’s harder than when it was just me, but there’s minimal food waste sitting around (clean up crumbs, empty the garbage, don’t leave puddles of water around, etc).
I’m hoping it’s some kind of beetle. Never had roaches and the idea utterly squicks me out.
There’s something like a million species of beetle, so odds are in your favor.
Without a pic, it’s going to be hard to say much. Try using bright diffuse light, and if your camera has a macro setting, use it.
another option is to step back, and then zoom in, then crop as needed. This often gets a good image.
Yeah, I saw some critters like that online, it doesn’t look much like that. Definite two-tone color scheme with stripes, as opposed to a sort of “multiple shades of brown”.
I specifically googled the “blue guts” part, only found one reference from someone else who had what sounded like the same kinda bug, they didn’t get any definite answer.
I have found some beetles like that too, and I also live in the bay area. I find them outside, or inside within a few feet of the front door where they seem to die. They don’t seem to be actually living in the house, they just occasionally wander in. The ones I find have a surprisingly tough shell. They don’t seem cockroach like at all.
When I was going to work this morning I saw one or two outside the door (thus the photo) and I checked the metal threshold at the bottom and found a couple of dead ones tucked in there…“doorbugs”?
GusNSpot I don’t think they are those - we call them pillbugs around here, they have that segmented grey shell, these look to be built more like your standard beetle (non-flexible body).
And thanks Colibri. I spent some time on that site earlier scrolling through the cockroaches and beetles section but didn’t see that one (or it didn’t look quite like our visitor). I posted a link in that thread to see what others think…maybe what we’ve got is an earlier stage of them?
