Green Metallic Clerid Beetle
Head
Bulbous Antennae Clerid
Profile
| Green Metallic Clerid Beetle Head | | Bulbous Antennae Clerid Profile | | ||
 | Class: | Animals (Animalia) - Jointed Legs (Arthropoda) - Insects (Insecta) | |||
| Order: | Beetles (Coleoptera) | ||||
| Family: | Clerid Beetle (Cleridae) iNaturalist Observation | ||||
| Species: | Bulbous Antennae Clerid (Sedlacekvia sp) | ||||
| This Photo: | 🔍Dorsal🔎 | ||||
Thank you Mark Hura for identifying this species for us General Species Information: Found on Ellura (in the Murray Mallee, SA) and elsewhere 1st Live Photo on-line: This is a rare find. We thought it was Sedlacekvia tanamica, but Mark suggests it might be an undescribed species. That's not to say it is rare, but doesn't seem to be found by people very much. Very little is known about them. To the naked eye it looks just like an ant, but because it was on concrete the large antennae stood out and we thought it was a small Ant-nest Beetle. But closer inspection shows quite different antennae, bulbous rather than filamented. At only 4-5mm tip to tail, it's fairly small. Overall it is dark brown and hairy, with dark red patches on it's shoulders. Not well studied, there have been records of the genus in NT (near Uluru), Victoria & NSW; along with this one & some Mark found in SA. Mark said " the elytral apices are interesting. The apices in S. tanamica are attenuated, whereas in S. kinchegaensis they are rounded. Mine are definitely rounded and the 2 elytrons meet neatly together at the apex when closed. Yours appears somewhat in between - rounded but also slightly attenuated, not to the extreme of the type though: https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/specimens/1023001 This is one of the things I mentioned earlier about having one or only a few specimens in a type series - you can't really gauge the range of variability. Other differences between the 2 include the punctures on the humeral angles (shoulders) of the elytron - bare in S. tanamica but regularly punctured in S. kinchegaensis and pronotum with a small bare, shiny patch on S. tanamica, but densely punctured throughout on S. kinchegaensis." Mark found one over near Bakara in Dec. | |||||
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