Delightfully disgusting beetles
I WAS crossing the boardwalk at one of our nature reserves the other day when a rather beautiful insect landed in front of me.
It was a large beetle with a striking orange and black pattern, I took its picture which I have shared with you here.
Using my iNaturalist phone app, I discovered that this was a sexton beetle, one of several burying beetles in the UK.
I had never seen one before.
But the more I learn about it, the more gory it gets.
The sexton beetle is known as the undertaker of the animal world.
If you are reading this while you are eating your dinner, stop now.
This beetle finds dead animals, buries them and feeds and breeds on their corpses.
It is mainly happy to chomp away and meet up with its mate around dead mice and birds.
The sexton beetle gets its name from the sexton of the church whose duty it was to look after the graveyard - a fitting name given its love of corpses.
Its antennae is fitted with receptors able to detect rotting bodies from metres, even kilometres, away from where it is hunting.
These beetles will fly at day or night to find decaying bodies.
Males meet females at the corpse, fighting off rivals, before they take charge and bury it.
The female lays her eggs on the body and when the larvae hatch they will feed on the rotting flesh.
Burying beetles are unusual in the beetleworld because both males and females continue to care for the larvae after they hatch - feeding them from the corpse – which is lovely, if you don’t think about it too much.
These beasties can grow up to 3cm long, that’s over an inch.
They are a flat-looking, chunky beetle with that black and orange pattern on the wing cases.
Burying and using rotting bodies is a useful way of cleaning up the countryside, so we should be grateful to the sexton beetles for their behaviour.
They are just one of millions of kinds of insects that inhabit the world, but many of these insects are under threat because of pesticides and climate change.
Every insect is there for a reason, to kill smaller insects or eat dead stuff or be eaten by birds, mammals or other insects.
You can help our amazingly diverse insects by supporting the Wildlife Trusts Action
For Insects Campaign at www.lancswt.org.uk/ wilder-future-campaign/ action-insects.
To support the work of the Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside, text WILD09 with the amount you want to donate to 70070.