Love, Love Me Do

From the impressive stag beetle to the Devil’s coach horse and the iridescent glow-worm, David Tomlinson picks his favourite 18 beetles out of the 4,000-plus species thought to reside in the UK, together with an international interloper

AS a schoolboy obsessed with birds and butterflies, I never found the time or inspiration to investigate the third b—the beetles—until I came face to jaws with my first male stag beetle. I still recall what impressed me most. It wasn’t the size, although this formidable beetle was as big as a matchbox, nor the fierce antlers, but the fact that this extraordinary creature could fly, which it promptly did as soon as I got down to investigate it.

Suddenly, it flipped its front wings (its elytra) forward, revealing its improbable hind wings. They whirred into action and the beetle was off—a clumsier flying machine it was impossible to imagine.

In those distant days, it took a visit to the library to find out more. Lucanus cervus was, I discovered, the biggest of the 4,000 or so beetles to be found in these islands. Its lifecycle was as unlikely as the beetle itself, as the larva spends five or six years munching and boring its way through dead wood.

Hardly the most nutritious of food, so it’s no wonder the larva takes so long to mature. When it finally emerges as an adult, it has only a few weeks to mate and start the whole cycle again.

The ability to fly is something that most of the world’s beetles are capable of, although few spend much time in the air. Most are ground-dwellers, their adult lives spent rummaging around in stones or leaf litter. Others, presumably those that are good on the wing, are attracted to flowers: beetles are thought to be the original pollinators, first visiting flowers when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. According to one source, beetles are responsible for pollinating 88% of the 240,000 species of flowering plants around the world, a remarkable statistic.