 | Longhorned Beetle - Batyle suturalis Family Cerambycidae - Longhorned Beetles Live adult beetles photographed at Oxford, Wisconsin. Size: 10mm Beetles Main | Beetles Index | Longhorns | Leaf Beetles | Soldier | Blister | Lady | Scarab |
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Cerambycidae is a cosmopolitan family of beetles characterized by their extremely long antennae, which are sometimes up to 2.5 x longer than the beetle's body. Many longhorns are serious agricultural pests, as their larvae have the unfortunate habit of boring wood. The Asian Longhorn beetle, for instance has been responsible for the preventive destruction of thousands of trees in Northern Illinois and other locations in the United States. Hear 'Cerambycidae' pronounced. Most Cerambycidae larvae feed within dead, dying or even decaying wood, but some taxa are able to use living plant tissue. Girdlers (adults of the Onciderini, larvae of genera in the tribes Methiini, Hesperophanini and Elaphidiini) sever living branches or twigs, with the larvae developing within the nutrient-rich distal portion. The larvae of a few species move freely through the soil, feeding externally upon roots or tunneling up under the root crown. [3] Most adult cerambycids feed on flowers and pollen, and can be important pollinators of flowering plants. Other species consume sap, leaves, blossoms, fruit, bark or fungi. [3] |
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The eyes are notched or actually wrap around the base of the antennae (fig.1), and in at least one species, the red milkweed beetle, the eye is split in two with the antennae inserted between the sections. There are over 20,000 species described, with over 250 genera and 1100 species in North America. Many longhorns are serious agricultural pests, as their larvae have the unfortunate habit of boring wood. The Asian Longhorn beetle, for instance, has been responsible for the preventive destruction of thousands of trees in Illinois and other locations in the United States.
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Order Coleoptera: Beetles are the dominant form of life on earth: one of every five living species is a beetle. Coleoptera is the largest order in the animal kingdom, containing a third of all insect species. There are about 400,000 known species worldwide, ~30,000 of which live in North America. Beetles live in nearly every habitat, and for every kind of food, there's probably a beetle species that eats it. Beetles first appeared during the lower Permian period, about 270 mya Beetles Index | Longhorns | Leaf Beetles | Soldier | Blister | Lady | Scarab |
