Your Forum

Mary : A coleopterist I am not but your beetle could have been a Lesser Stag Beetle Dorcus parallelpipedus. They occasionally turn up in my moth trap at Ingatestone. Mind you, I have relied on Chinery (1993) for indentification, who states that, unlike the female Stag Beetle, the Lesser has only one tooth on the middle tibia. Identifying beetles from a popular field guide is likely to bring me a severe reprimand from the Club committee! The moth trap also turns up a few other beetles each year; most often the Great Diving Beetle Dytiscus marginalis; Cockchafer Melolontha melolontha, and various Burying Beetles Nicrophorus sp., including one or more species from the beautiful orange banded group and what is probably N.humator, an all black beetle with orange clubs to its antennae. Later in the summer I catch large numbers of Water Boatmen - alright, a bug not a beetle - and painstaking work it is too removing them from the trap and putting them back in the pond! At Blue House reserve last year we caught 26 Great Silver Beetles Hydrophilus piceus in the moth trap; or at least made twenty-six captures, three in a single night on one occasion. Dor or Dung Beetles Geotrupes sp. also turn up occasionally but not as many as you would expect, given the quantity of dung in the fields. I am told this is because the medication they give cattle to treat internal parasites is toxic to beetle larvae feeding on their dung. Finally, if you are still with me, Harlequin Ladybirds have become a frequent bycatch in both traps in recent years although I rarely catch any native species. Whether this is because they are more susceptible to light attraction or because they have eaten all the native ones I am not sure! Graham