Bidentate-pronotum Jewel Beetle
S1, Male, profile
Bidentate-pronotum Jewel Beetle
S1, Male, Face
| Bidentate-pronotum Jewel Beetle S1, Male, profile | | Bidentate-pronotum Jewel Beetle S1, Male, Face | | ||
 | Class: | Animals (Animalia) - Jointed Legs (Arthropoda) - Insects (Insecta) | |||
| Order: | Beetles (Coleoptera) | ||||
| Family: | Jewel Beetle (Buprestidae) iNaturalist Observation | ||||
| Species: | Bidentate-pronotum Jewel Beetle (Chrysobothris sp) | ||||
| This Photo: | 🔍S1, Male, Anterior Femoral Inner Spine🔎 | ||||
Thank you Stephan Gottwald for identifying and Dr Peter Lang & Joshua Basham for confirming the id of this species for us General Species Information: Found on Ellura (in the Murray Mallee, SA) and elsewhere ~7.5mm long. We confused this for a Melobasis sp. Superficially they are incredibly similar to the 2 Melobasis that we photographed. There are a lot of differences when you look more closely. The face is less hairy, antennae shorter, elytra more rugose, elytra quite pointy at the front, BUT most importantly about half the size of the other two. To highlight the differences between this & Melobasis, Stephan said "The anterior femora have a noticeable inner spine" (it's visible in the antenna shot). Further Peter said "The shallowly depressed, differently-coloured fovae on the elytra (pinkish in the first image here) are characteristic of the genus." Peter just contacted us to let us know he's assigned a moniker to these of Chrysobothris sp. Bidentate pronotum. He said "I was excited to find that it breeds in the roots of Westringia rigida where it is associated with root galls, although there is evidence that it must use at least one other genus as well ... Your specimen matches C. sp. Bidentate pronotum on a good number of traits ... These include: the weakly bilobed sides of the pronotum (seen best on the first image DSC02773E), the generally coppery coloured underside (DSC02778E), the rather simple puncturation on the front of the head (DSC02770E), and its relatively small size (c. 7.5 mm long) ... DSC02769E best shows the terminal ventral segment (apical abdominal ventrite). Based on that, I think your specimen is a male. The apex is shallowly incised between the tooth at each corner (in the female it seems to be slightly convex between the teeth). Also there is no sign of a median thickening ridge (associated with female) on any part of the centre line of that apical ventrite." | |||||
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