Padded Diving Beetle
Female, Leg Hair underwater
Padded Diving Beetle
Female, Elytra Lifted to Fly Away
| Padded Diving Beetle Female, Leg Hair underwater | | Padded Diving Beetle Female, Elytra Lifted to Fly Away | | ||
 | Class: | Animals (Animalia) - Jointed Legs (Arthropoda) - Insects (Insecta) | |||
| Order: | Beetles (Coleoptera) | ||||
| Family: | Diving Beetle (Aquatic: Dytiscidae) iNaturalist Observation | ||||
| Species: | Padded Diving Beetle (Eretes australis) | ||||
| This Photo: | Female, Punctuations | ||||
Thank you Mark Hura & Saida Noor for confirming the id of this species for us General Species Information: Found on Ellura (in the Murray Mallee, SA) and elsewhere After the heaviest rainfall since June 2019, we found a large number of these in early Feb 2020. The males have padded feet, shown here, used to hold onto the female when mating. The female we measured was slightly smaller than the male, with the female being ~13mm & the male being ~15mm. There did seem to be a lot of size variation in specimens we saw. They can fly, and breath air, taking a bubble of air with them when diving to the bottom of a water source. They are very fast swimmers. They have hair on their middle & hind legs that act link fins. When out of the water these hairs collapse into a row along the edge of each leg. The patterning on their elytra seems to vary quite a bit, but there always seem to be a solid black mark about midway down the elytra, along with 2 or 3 rows of small black marks (mixed in with light & dark patches) that aren't very obvious in the live specimens. Compared to other diving beetles, the head does seem more prominant/protrudes from the body. Pronotum shape is also useful to help with diagnostics. The male feet seem unusual, but are similar to some other diving beetles. The Pictorial Guide to the Diving Beetles of SA says "A distinctive species, unusual in having the surface punctuation on the prothorax much smaller than on the wing cases.", which is quite obvious here. | |||||
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