Beetles: We Love Them, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!
By Ruth D’Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener I love beetles. Their sheer diversity fills me with delight. That a stag beetle, a ladybird, a devil’s coach horse, a scarab and a great diving beetle can all be related just blows me away. A beetle is even the subject of one of my all-time favourite old jokes:
Zoo keepers travelling on a train with some of their charges were perturbed to discover that one of their dung beetles was missing. Happily, it was later found in the Buffet Car trying to roll away a British Rail scotch egg.
Beetles belong to the order Coleoptera, (from Greek koleos, meaning a sheath and pteron, a wing: beetles keep their wings sheathed under a leathery case). The Coloeptera comprise predators, pests and scavengers, vegetarians and parasites, so that for every beetle that helps you with the gardening (ladybird, sexton beetle) another is eating your house (carpet beetle, woodworm beetle). So I was absolutely delighted the other night to see this little face peering at me through the kitchen window:
It’s that time of year that the maybugs, or cockchafers (Melolontha melolontha), head out and about. Cockchafers are related to scarab beetles. They are pretty rubbish at flying which means they smack head-first into things like cyclists, and have to be fished out of my pond where they have just fallen straight in. Happily, like the Ranger’s little spiderlings, cockchafers do not bite or sting, so can be handled with impunity. Occasionally, when digging, I come across a horrific large (45mm!!) grub, all fat white comma-shaped body and grasping jaws:
This is the larva of the cockchafer that lives in the soil and feeds on plant roots. It is sometimes known as a rookworm because rooks particularly enjoy winkling the larvae out of grassland. Larvae stay underground for 3-4 years before emerging as adult beetles. Some say the cockchafer is a pest because the larvae damage roots, and the adult beetle eats the leaves and flowers of deciduous trees and shrubs. I find them utterly charming, so a few munched roots or leaves is a small price to pay to have these little cuties tapping on my kitchen window in early summer.
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Hi Paul – conceivably a fox could have dug them up but my money would be on one of the crow family – magpies, jackdaws, crows or rooks. Cockchafer larvae are also known as rookworms because of those birds’ taste for them. The larvae live just underneath the surface so I guess the birds detect them in the same way that they do worms etc. A friend’s lawn is frequently torn up by crows feasting on the larvae. If you notice anything digging around the stump, do let us know what it is.
I havecome across about twenty of these little darlings this morning, something had dug them up from an old rotting tree stump and eaten most of them as there were only bits left of many of them, but about ten whole ones. I would love to know what it was that dug them up and how did it know they were there? Could it have been a fox?
i have found patches of white fat stuff under the soil can anyone shed any light on this
The Ranger responds:Well no, not really, unless you can give a pretty good description, show us a photo or two, and tell us where you are and what sort of habitat your soil is in.
Hello Rachel, I think this probably is some sort of moth chrysalis. Stag beetle larvae are very much like the cockchafer larvae and live inside dead wood. What I usually do with these is put them inside a large jar covered lightly with whatever material they were found in(soil, leaf mould), and put a twig in as well. Cover the jar mouth with muslin and an elastic band and keep it somewhere relatively cool. Watch regularly and see what emerges, identify it (send us a pic!) and let it go. I hatched an elephant hawk moth like this some years ago.
I have found some kind of huge pupa in my garden and I can’t identify it from my book – any ideas?
see my blog on – http://racheljoyce.blogspot.com/2007/06/what-is-this.html – and leave your suggestions
thanks
Wow. That’s a fine-looking beastie. Keep showing us them Wild Things to make our urban hearts sing!
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Baby pandas? Pah! Give me an invertebrate any time. Perhaps us humans have our Groucho Marx comedy glasses/nose/moustache, whereas the beetles’ version is comedy glasses with attached antennae!
Who needs baby pandas when you can see such cuties in your garden! I can vouch for their lack of flying ability when one got caught in my long hair when I was younger. It took me a while to notice it but even that experience didn’t put me off them. Is it me or does he look like he’s wearing a pair of comedy glasses in this picture!