Melolontha melolontha (Linnaeus, 1758)

Beetles....

British Beetles...

What to say about British Beetles...

Regular readers (hypothetically speaking), might remember me rambling without direction about the diversity of flies and beetles in this post (About the lovely and bizarre Diasemopsis meigenii). Well, we're going to expand a little bit on that here.

As a resident of the UK, I am both cursed and blessed where entomology is concerned - cursed because three of the biggest reasons to have low diversity of wildlife are: a) being an island; b) being a long way from the tropics and therefore having a history of ice-ages wiping out the local wildlife; and c) being a densely populated and heavily developed part of Europe, where people have been disturbing wildlife as heavily as they can since just before the ice left. Blessed, however, because this limited fauna is one of the best studied on the planet, which makes it much easier to identify most species without breaking the bank.

It is also one of the few places in the world where the known species of fly greatly outnumber the known species of beetle, and this, in concert with its uniquely well-studied fauna, is one point of support for flies being more diverse than beetles.

This brings me - finally - to my point. Flies are - as the name suggests - mostly quite good at flying, if only because their bodies are so light that they need very little energy to stay in the air. This gets them blown across such insignificant bodies of water as the English Channel with a frequency much higher than, say, large beetles.

It does have a handful (some of which, like the greater stag-beetle (Lucanus cervus), are in a fairly alarming decline because of the incompatibility of a large population which burns all available wood in the winter and a beetle that spends several years as a larva inside dead wood and doesn't survive being burnt), and today's subject is probably the most frequently encountered of that handful...

Eukaryota
  Animalia
    Eumetazoa
      Bilateralia
        Nephrozoa
          Protostomia
            Ecdysozoa
              Arthropoda
                Hexapoda
                  Insecta
                    Dicondylia
                      Pterygota
                        Manopterygota
                          Neoptera
                            Eumetabola
                              Endopterygota
                                Coleopterida
                                  Coleoptera
                                    Polyphaga
                                      Scarabaeiformia - Beetles that are like scarab beetles
                                        Scarabaeoidea - Scarabs and friends
                                          Scarabaeidae - Scarab beetles
                                            Melolonthinae - Chafer beetles...
                                              Melolonthini

Melolontha melolontha

 (Linnaeus, 1758)

 Also known as the Common Cockchafer, it had gone through a period of being not-that-common (Europeans have been very fond of pesticides for almost as long as Americans), but is making a sort-of-recovery lately. There is one very similar species in the UK, which is distinguished by having a blunt, rounded tip to its abdomen, rather than the rather pointed one of this species (not visible in either photograph displayed here).

A more informative view of the same (male) is shown below: