Sometime late last night, a beetle seems to have flown into my bedroom. I found it this morning, clinging stubbornly to my pillow. When I tried to push it away, it landed on the floor and walked around coolly, till I caught it up in a piece of paper and released it outside.
Not a very unusual happening, except this beetle was one I had never seen before– about 2 cms in length, and a very pale colour, almost a dirty yellow. I have seen large beetles but not one this large inside a home or building. The beetles that usually visit are black or brown or green or purplish, unlike the pale colour of this one. And my beetle was not iridescent, as beetles often are. But it did have the hooked strong legs that make it pretty unpleasant when a beetle lands on you!
But then beetles form the largest order among insects, with over 4 lakh species of them around. So coming across a new one is not unexpected. Nor is coming across one that is 2 cms long—after all, beetles can range in size from the barely visible, to large tropical species that are the size of a human hand.
But what are beetles? Obviously a type of insect, but what distinguishes them is that their front pair of wings is hardened into wing-cases or elytra, which cover and protect the hind wings and abdomen. They belong to the order Coleoptera, in the superorder Endopterygota.
Coming to the iridescence of beetles and other insects, some are and some are not. But why are they iridescent? Apparently, it helps in camouflage. It seems counter-intuitive, but field experiments found that birds found and ate 85% of non-iridescent baits, but only 60% of iridescent ones!
The most interesting of the beetles are the dung beetles, of which there are about 30,000 species. Basically, dung beetles fly around looking for the dung of herbivores, which has a lot of undigested and semi-digested stuff, which the beetles suck up as a great source of nutrition. There are three types of dung beetles: rollers, tunnelers, and dwellers. Rollers makes balls of bits of dung, roll it away, and bury it. The balls they make are either used by the female to lay her eggs in or as food for the adults to eat. Tunnelers dig into a pat of dung, and lay their eggs in these holes. Dwellers stay on top of the dung pat and lay their eggs, live there and raise the young. Thought most depend on herbivore dung, there are a few species which feed on carnivore dung.
Dung beetles, Scarabaeus sacer fascinated the ancient Egyptians to the extent that they worshipped them. They believed the dung beetle kept the Earth revolving like a giant ball of dung.
Another type of beetles which are general favourites are the Ladybirds. Farmers have special reasons to love them, as they eat aphids and other plant pests. One ladybug can eat up to 5000 aphids in a lifetime!
But sadly, a half-hour of googling through various identification sites hasn’t helped me identify my particular beetle-visitor. Google Lens helpfully tells me it a Christmas Beetle, but that seems unlikely because those are native to Australia, and my sighting was in Bangalore.
Well, the search will continue.
–Meena
Millennial Matriarchs 