Carrion beetle gathering

Sometimes I have to walk great distances to find a suitable scene to highlight; other times, I just have to hang out the laundry. This is the latter case, when I discovered, to my amazement, a congregation of Carrion Beetles assembling on a sap seep near the bottom of a large oak that held our clothes line. I'd never seen so many members of the Oiceoptoma noveboracense clan before, and there were so many different sizes that I wondered if these beetles engaged in extended parental care. They actually do feed their larvae for a time, but there the care ends. The seep must have attracted a wide variety of Silphid beetles of various ages, and as I looked at my photographs of the gathering, I noticed something else I'd read about: the beetles had carry-on luggage. If you look just to the left of the largest Silphid in the center, you'll spot a tiny mite crawling on the beetle's back. You can spot the mites in other places too, and these critters use the beetles as a kind of transport system. In return for the free rides, the mites eat fly eggs and larvae that would otherwise compete with the beetles for carrion. It's a good, if grim, symbiosis.