If you’ve ever had the experience of “picking” aquatic insect samples (separating the insects from the massive amount of other junk), you know how mind numbingly tedious this activity can be.  But then you catch a glimpse of something you haven’t ever seen before, something that’s really unique, and it is suddenly the most exciting thing you’ve ever done!  This beetle was one of those finds for me, so I snapped a photo through the microscope eyepiece with a cruddy digital camera:

Hydrochus sp. I think the species is stephanii and it's either a hydrophilid or hydrochid depending on where you look

This tiny aquatic beetle in the genus Hydrochus is such a stunner!  I actually started yelling, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh!” when I came across it, thereby cementing my reputation among my coworkers as the biggest nerd in the water quality lab.

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