Ever feel like you don't measure up???

Lucanus cervus cervus males with about 35 mm are very common here in my hometown. I find many of these small stags every season but over 65 mm are rather rare here. In my hole life I only found two males which were really big,
80 mm and one of 83 mm (unfortunately killed by a bird but only the abdomen was missing). Maybe it depends on the region or the population which sizes are more common.

harder to find is not synonym of better price
It is true for everything in insect. an extremely uncommon pyralid will never reach the price of a normal Charaxes.
by smallest that means also really small, counting mm like for the biggest.
One have to connsiderer the mean of a Gauss curve to see "objectively" what is small and what is big.

Hello

Well, in answer to bugman, I suppose that to determine wich is a big size and small size for a species there must be lots of records and sampling in all the populations known of the species, so maybe in some population the average size is quite smaller (like yours) or bigger than the whole average size for the species (this is sometimes one the first steps on the speciation process). So in diferent populations the average size for the specimens are of course different, but also maybe in those poulations the bigger and smaller specimens are quite more rare than the average one and the distribution that the sizes of the specimens follows is a gaussian distribution... Or maybe not as Africacoleo says, and the size on the insects is not aproximated to a normal distribution so more like a chi-square or any other kind of distribution. In those cases of non normal distribution, then the biggest and smallest specimens won't be equally rare, and some of the extremes, bigger or samller, would be more rare than the other... I really can't tell because I didn't read any study about this, but as I said, I suppose this topic must had been treated by someone.
And about the price of the smaller... Well, I guess that despite being almost equally rare than bigger ones they never will reach the prices of the bigger because they are less spectacular (although very interesting). But maybe an exteme small specimen can be sold for sure more expensive than an average small specimen.
And because I think the photos of extreme sizes are very nice and interesting I will post this two G.regius males, 104, and 65mm. Although they aren't the top record extreme, they do very nice contrast for very small and big specimens

Regards

Lucanidae25: nice to see you don't toss all the runts! Very nice extremities.

104 is the biggest regius I've seen! And he looks impressive next to that boy.

I'm happy to know that I'm not the only one who finds this topic interesting.

Tim

Tim, very nice regius, I meant for the bigger one. ;D

I think this trophy collecting the bigger the better and no one cares about the samllest is especially common among Lucanidae collectors. I'm one of them, it's not really my concern with the smallest because it dosen't really represent a sp with its full potential gene expression (only the biggest will show its gene potential). Lucanidae isn't easy to ID when they're small unless they're telodonte. They all look the same when they're small unlike other family like Cerambycidae and Cetoniidae, the smallest is still in scale with the bigger one, just smaller in sizes but Lucanidae can looks like a totally different sp when ther're small. I'm only keeping the small one because it can turned out to be something different if I'm collecting them in the fields but most of the time they're just small.

If I'm showing my smallest Lucanidae, none of my Lucanidae friends would be interested. I've never met a Lucanidae collector would be interested in the smallest.

I can't believe you kept that runt with a missing leg. ;D

They are an amazing set!
Thanks for posting bichos.

Tim