The Autokatcher rides again
I stumbled across this photo on a German beetling website about 9 years ago and thought it would be brilliant to give it a go. It’s taken me a while but I’m nearly there. Here’s my brand new custom-built Autokatcher frame, bolted to a roof-bar. Brian and Shirley Nelson (B&S Entomological Services) are going to run up a net bag for me and then the Autokatcher will be ready to hit the road!
Autokatcher frame
As far as I know, only two people have ever used a vehicle-mounted Autokatcher in Britain, though honorary mention must go to B.S. Williams who used a bicycle-mounted version in the 1930s! Alex Williams used an Autokatcher in the lanes of Kent in the early 1970s and found quite a few rare and unexpected species – there is a great photo of it in the Coleopterist’s Handbook. And Richard Lyszkowski told me he’d once spent an evening using an Autokatcher which generated an immense haul of mostly tiny beetles that he has never managed to identify!
There’s a great article about using Autokatchers, including the occasional misadventures, on Andreas Herrmann’s website here.
Sunshiners, Moonshiners and Stem-climbers
The ground beetles in the genera Amara and Curtonotus have always been among my favourite beetles. In the Breckland, where I cut my beetling teeth, they are a highly diverse group. Along with the other seed-eating carabids (e.g. Harpalus and Ophonus), they are the ‘arable weeds’ of the beetle world, turning up in places where there is soil disturbance, bare ground and lots of ruderal plants producing lots of seeds. Several of the 31 species occurring in Britain and Ireland are rare.
Many coleopterists have struggled to identify these beetles. Even the name Amara is reputedly derived from the Latin word for bitter (amarus) in reference to the bitter experience of trying to identify them! I have now produced a detailed identification guide with photos of all but one of the species which I hope will sweeten the experience.
Download here: Identification guide to the Amara and Curtonotus (Carabidae) of Britain and Ireland.
The guide also introduces new English names for all the species as Sunshiners, Moonshiners and Stem-climbers.
The commonest British Amara is Amara aenea, or the Streak Sunshiner.
Jenny Taylier
It is a line that many budding entomologists fear to cross. Even some of the established figures in British entomology are not prepared to go there. I’m talking about dissection, gen-detting, whipping their nadgers out … genitalia dissection.
True, most of the time it’s just a bit of a chore. But it makes identification of many beetles much quicker and much more accurate than making difficult judgements about, say, the relative breadth of the pronotum.
Occasionally, dissection reveals structures that really are a marvel to behold. I well remember a lunchtime conversation in a busy pub nearly 20 years ago with Brian Eversham and an aleocharine staphylinid expert: let’s call him “Mike”. I think I was probably expressing disbelief that anyone could find the will to try and identify such horrible little beetles, let alone dissect them. Mike’s response, delivered for all in the bar to hear, was “But under the microscope THE FEMALE GENITALIA ARE ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS!!” The next few moments were mortifying but gradually the hubbub of bar conversation returned.
Gyrophaena is a genus of 19 British species of small aleocharine staphylinids that breed in rotting fungi. The male genitalia are truly extraordinary in this genus. I look at these and wonder why all these hooks, corkscrews and knobbles have evolved and what function they perform? I guess they must make it difficult or impossible for a male of one species to mate with a female of another, like trying to fit a key into the wrong lock. All four of the Gyrophaena species pictured below were found in a single tuft of oyster mushrooms.
Gyrophaena joyioides aedeagus
Gyrophaena manca aedeagus
Gyrophaena gentilis aedeagus
Gyrophaena affinis aedeagus
Oh yes, and in case you’re wondering about the title of this blog … when I told my wife I was writing a blog about genitalia, she said “Jenny who?”
When to go beetling?
In 20 years of beetling, I have done most of it in April, May, June, July and August. In fact, I think of this as “the field season”. And if I count up the number of beetle records I’ve made by month, May, June, July and August are the top months.
So, for beetle survey work, when you want to maximise the number of records you can make for each day’s fieldwork, May, June, July and August are the best months, especially May.
But there’s more to beetling than survey work. What would be the best time of year for me to go out and get a beetle tick? Over the 20 years, most of my ticks have come from May, June and July. But that’s largely thanks to a massive amount of recording in those months.
Surprisingly, when I’ve gone beetling in October, November, December and January it’s been much better for ticks. And August has been the worst month. A beetle found in November is over three times more likely to be a tick for me than one found in August!
Compared to most other branches of entomology, one of the great things about being a coleopterist is that it is a genuinely year-round activity. Admittedly, winter beetling tends to be pretty grubby work: tussocking, and sieving through compost heaps, manure, wood-chip piles and flood debris. But I’m obviously going to have to man up and do a lot more of that sort of beetling in my next 20 years as a coleopterist.
Sieving wood-chip at Dinton Pastures, with Tony Allen and Andrew Duff.
Sieving manure at Denham Marsh Wood with Tony Allen.
Thanks for the dets
Another surprise from my 20-year dataset of beetle records was the large number of people who have helped by identifying (= determining) beetles for me. These 28 names came up and I am grateful to each and every one. So often when I’ve been completely stuck with an identification problem, it has only been by getting help from others that I’ve been able to crack it.
| Keith N.A. Alexander | Brian Levey |
| Tony (A.J.W.) Allen | Derek A. Lott |
| Roger G. Booth | Martin L. Luff |
| Stan Bowestead | Richard M. Lyszkowski |
| Dave Boyce | Darren J. Mann |
| Jon Cooter | Bob (R.J.) Marsh |
| Martin Collier | Howard Mendel |
| Mike L. Cox | Mike G. Morris |
| Brian C. Eversham | Brian Nelson |
| Andy P. Foster | Glenda M. Orledge |
| Garth N. Foster | Eric G. Philp |
| Peter M. Hammond | R.W. John Read |
| Norman F. Heal | Martin Rejzek |
| Peter J. Hodge | R. Colin Welch |
Even this list only tells part of the story. There are quite a few other people missing (e.g. Max) who have helped with suggesting or confirming identifications that I’ve ultimately computerised as my own.
Getting into British and Irish beetles is a hard journey. I realise that I couldn’t have made as much progress as I have without the generous help of those who have cleared the trail ahead.
20 years of beetling: a good start
One of the best things about beetling for me is that I can never be bored: there are always new beetles to be seen and always more to learn. It’s also one of the worst things about beetling: there will always be loads of beetles I haven’t managed to see and loads of things I should know but don’t!
In twenty years of beetling in Britain and Ireland, I’ve made 33,453 records of beetles, from 525 different 10-km squares and on average seen a new beetle every 3.3 days. So it doesn’t feel like I’ve been mucking about at it! But take a look at this graph:
There are two really surprising things about this graph. Firstly, I’ve only seen just over half the British and Irish beetle fauna (the red line marks the half-way point). And secondly, my list has grown in pretty much a straight line for 20 years and I’m still seeing new beetles at about the same rate as when I started. Clearly I am still on the steep beginners’ part of the learning curve with no sign that I’m approaching the broad, sunlit plateau of being a beetle expert!
It just shows what a big job it is to get to know all the British and Irish beetles. I once had the chance to pick the brains of veteran coleopterist Alex Williams during a car journey and got onto the subject of aleocharine staphylinids and the many obstacles that have to be overcome to be able to identify this group. I was looking for advice, or at least sympathy! But Alex’s simple yet profound response was “Well, we wouldn’t be coleopterists if we didn’t enjoy a challenge!”.
Alex is right. Coleoptera is a big, challenging group, guaranteed to last a lifetime and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I’m glad that it is getting easier to identify beetles. And anyone taking up the challenge of beetles now should be able to hit the half-way mark in much quicker time.
20 years of beetling
Twenty years ago to the day, on Sunday 26th January 1992, I became a coleopterist! I was birding at Dungeness but turned over a stone and collected my first beetle. I was steeling myself for hours at the microscope, poring over victorian textbooks and baffling anatomical diagrams. But actually I just took it into work and showed it to Brian Eversham, my boss at the time, who instantly identified it as Agonum albipes with just a glance! Until then, I really admired the sort of birders who could call a flyover Richard’s Pipit, and I hadn’t realised that the sort of field ID skills that birders have could be applied to beetles. Keying things out at the microscope and working with museum collections is a big part of getting to know the beetles but a lot of species can be identified in the field. Some can even be identified in flight! My beetling career took off straight away and I have never stopped.
I’ve got all my beetle records from the first twenty years in a MapMate database: I suspect very few other coleopterists have been in that position. So I’ve taken the opportunity to look back at the records and do a bit of analysis. I’ll be giving a talk about the results at Coleopterists’ Day next weekend so I won’t spoil the talk by revealing them here now. But for a taster, here’s a map of all the 10-km squares where I’ve recorded beetles in the last 20 years.
My beetle records - 1992 to 2012.
The toughest day of 2010: Phratora polaris
24th June 2010: day three of my Scottish fieldwork campaign was to be a change from surveying for saproxylic beetles in woodland. I was headed to the summit plateau of Ruadh-stac Mòr, Beinn Eighe where Mike Morris (1970) discovered the leaf-beetle Phratora polaris new to Britain in 1966. Ruadh-stac Mòr lies within the massive (5,800 hectares) Torridon Forest SSSI.
male Phratora polaris
I had picked a day with a dry forecast but normal weather forecasts don’t apply in the mountains. I set off walking at 07.35 and it started raining 10 minutes later. Within another 40 minutes, I was out of mobile signal for the rest of the day. After a couple of hours of slog, I entered the fearsome Coire Mhic Fhearchair and picked my way across to the steep scree fan in the far corner, passing a few mangled bits of plane wreckage where some poor aviator met his doom. The scree was treacherous underfoot and I was ascending into cloud, with worsening rain and an increasingly strong wind. At the top of the scree, the route steepens into a narrow chute of shattered rocks, exposed and channelling a wicked gusting wind. No place to miss your footing. Step by careful step I got to the top. But there was no relief there – I found myself on a knife-edge ridge in ferocious gusting wind and driving rain. On hands and knees I found a cleft in a boulder and wedged myself half in. Put some dry layers on and decided I’d better abandon the survey and descend. But actually couldn’t face the chute again straight away so I decided to stroll up towards the summit plateau for a bit of respite before beginning my descent. Conditions had worsened further and I was soon reduced to lying full-stretch on the ridge-top path, clinging to the ground and holding my rain-spattered specs on to my face. I realised the ridge had broadened out and I could safely drop off the path to the leeward side, where I could get about in a crouch rather than a crawl.
The chute.
I soon realised I was treading on quality turf: dolomitic limestone grassland with Racomitrium moss, Sibbaldia Sibbaldia procumbens, Dwarf Cudweed Gnaphalium supinum and, more importantly, some patches of Dwarf Willow Salix herbacea, the foodplant of Phratora polaris. I found fragments of a dead Phratora polaris under the first stone I lifted, and a live one under the third stone. Flushed with success I carried out a standard 30-minute timed search but didn’t see any more of the leaf-beetles. All I saw were three Oreostiba tibialis (Staphylinidae), a common species of montane habitats, and one Patrobus septentrionis (Carabidae), found feeding on a pill-beetle Byrrhus fasciatus (Byrrhidae).
Habitat of Phratora polaris.
Phratora polaris was added to the British list (under the former generic name Phyllodecta) by Morris (1970) on the basis of specimens he found near the summit of Ruadh-stac Mòr, Beinn Eighe in 1966 and 1967. Morris (1970) also reported a specimen collected by A.M. Easton near the summit of Tom a’ Chòinich, Inverness-shire in 1968. Owen (1983) added two further sites in 1981: Sgurr Mor and An Teallach, both Wester Ross. Lyszkowski (1988) found the species in 1984 some 60 miles to the south of these sites near the summit of Beinn Achaladair, Argyllshire. Cox (2007) was able to map the species from 9 Scottish 10-km squares of the national grid and commented that the species is “probably under-recorded”. Quite frankly, it’s no wonder!
Once I’d made it down to the bottom of the scree, I found some shelter from the dreadful weather and took a break. Astonishingly, a Mountain Bumblebee Bombus monticola flew past my nook as though it were just a normal summer’s day. I was also filled with respect for the elderly Munro-bagger I passed on my way down – he was heading up in shorts!
Acknowledgement
These observations were made during SSSI condition monitoring work for Scottish Natural Heritage.
References
Cox, M.L. (2007). Atlas of the seed and leaf beetles of Britain and Ireland (Coleoptera: Bruchidae, Chrysomelidae, Megalopodidae and Orsodacnidae). Pisces, Newbury.
Lyszkowski, R.M. (1988). Phyllodecta polaris Schneider (Col., Chrysomelidae) in Argyllshire. Entomologist’s monthly magazine, 124, 71.
Morris, M.G. (1970). Phyllodecta polaris Schneider (Col., Chrysomelidae) new to the British Isles from Wester Ross and Inverness-shire, Scotland. Entomologist’s monthly magazine, 106, 48 – 53.
Owen, J.A. (1983). More about Phyllodecta polaris Schneider (Col., Chrysomelidae) in Britain. Entomologist’s monthly magazine, 119, 191.
Owen, J.A. (1988). A note on the life history of Phyllodecta polaris Schneider (Col.: Chrysomelidae). Entomologist’s record and journal of variation, 100, 91 – 92.
When the hunter becomes the hunted
On 21st June 2010 I drove for 10 hours from home to get to Ullapool; the start of an 11-day entomological survey campaign in the west of Scotland. My survey site on 22nd was Rhidorroch Woods SSSI which turned out to be a couple of hours drive on dirt tracks up an increasingly beautiful glen. The weather was superb – a rare treat in NW Scotland – and I couldn’t wait to get into the field.
Rhidorroch Woods SSSI
This isolated veteran pine, above the modern-day treeline, was the best tree I found. Scarred by lightning strikes and ripped by the weight of winter snow, but still living, it was a magnet for saproxylic beetles.
On a fine, sunny day in Scotland, when big beetles like clicks, chafers and longhorns are buzzing past on the wing, there is no better place to be. As long as you’ve got a midge net (and are prepared to abandon all personal dignity and actually wear it)!
Undignified headgear
You also need to keep one hand free for swatting horseflies. And a little time is required each evening for tweezering off all the ticks!
It pretty much goes without saying, but the warning colours of this Bee Beetle Trichius fasciatus (a chafer) failed to frighten me. Very few of these Batesian mimics seem to be good enough at mimicry to fool the human eye.
Bee Beetle Trichius fasciatus
But, as I was investigating the hollow interior of a decaying birch, a bumblebee started harassing me at close quarters. I immediately backed off and legged it away for about 20 metres, reckoning I must have disturbed a nest. As soon as I stopped, I realised it was still buzzing round within a few inches of me. I carry an adrenaline injector with me at all times in case of bee stings: I’ve had a couple of bad allergic reactions in the past. But, even so, getting stung in such a remote spot could be difficult. I legged it back to the birch tree to grab my net, still with the bumblebee in pursuit, and netted it. Safe. Phew!!!
It was only then that I realised it wasn’t a bumblebee! The size, shape, flight and especially the buzzing tone were all spot on and had me completely fooled. But this was a fly, and like nothing I’d seen before. Much later, with help from Dave Gibbs and Andy Grayson I was able to identify it as Cephenemyia auribarbis.
Cephenemyia auribarbis
Cephenemyia auribarbis is a bot-fly (family Oestridae) and it was not looking to bite me or sting me but to lay eggs on me, so that its larvae could develop in either my nostrils, mouth or throat: a truly horrifying prospect! It should have been chasing after Red Deer, the usual host.
Acknowledgement
These observations were made during SSSI condition monitoring work for Scottish Natural Heritage.
Christmas shopping entomology
I know for most people a Christmas shopping trip is a lost natural history opportunity. But for a pan-species lister, something good can turn up wherever and whenever. First up, this striking black-and-red Arocatus ?longiceps? bug found on the trunk of a Plane tree while browsing the Christmas market on the Champs Élysées, Paris on 20th November. My French specimen (on the left) looks quite different to the Arocatus longiceps I have previously found on London’s Plane trees (on the right, from the Natural History Museum’s wildlife garden), with paler appendages and reduced black markings on the body.
Arocatus from the Champs Elysees (L) and NHM garden (R)
The following weekend we visited Whipsnade Zoo with friends Rich and Sara and budding mammalogist Lucy. As well as doing some Christmas shopping in the gift shop, we found a couple of interesting insects in the Insect House but on the loose. There were trails of a miniscule ant which I think is a species of dolichoderine but doesn’t seem to be included in Bolton & Collingwood’s RES Handbook, or Skinner & Allen’s Naturalists’ Handbook.
Miniscule ?dolichoderine? ant from Whipsnade
And on the exit door, this Australian Cockroach Periplaneta australasiae was making a bid for freedom. I’ve seen this species before in the Eden Project biomes.
Australian Cockroach Periplaneta australasiae
Finally, our local Tesco in Leighton Buzzard still supports a population of the weevil Otiorhynchus crataegi in the car park, first found here in September 2008. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only Bedfordshire site for this weevil but I’m sure if more people looked it could be found much more widely. It was discovered new to Britain in Berkshire in 1980 and has since been reported from Surrey and Middlesex (map here, doubtless incomplete).
Every little helps (the beetle list)
Entomologising in car park shrubberies can be pretty good. Look out for feeding signs such as notched leaves. Whenever I get out my beating tray and start thwacking the shrubberies, I always imagine I’m going to be either set upon by security guards or ridiculed by crowds of jeering shoppers. But, in practice, everyone studiously ignores me, though I sometimes think mothers take a tighter grip of their children’s hands as they pass! Richard ‘Bugman’ Jones would advise wearing a hi-vis vest in such circumstances: it makes you look so much more official!
Notched leaves on this Euonymus are the first sign that weevils are present.
Otiorhynchus crataegi makes quite regular, semi-circular notches in the edges of the leaves.
Otiorhynchus crataegi: at a supermarket near you?
Happy Christmas shopping everyone!
