Tetratomidae

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Tetratomidae
Tetratoma fungorum

Tetratoma fungorum

Systematics
Class : Insects (Insecta)
Order : Beetle (Coleoptera)
Subordination : Polyphaga
Partial order : Cucujiformia
Superfamily : Tenebrionoidea
Family : Tetratomidae
Scientific name
Tetratomidae
Billberg , 1820
Eustrophopsis bicolor
Holostrophus bifasciatus
Cyanopenthe taiwana
Tetratoma ancora

The Tetratomidae are a small family of beetles that inhabit fungal wood or tree sponges.

features

Adults

The Tetratomidae belong to the superfamily of the Tenebrionoidea (formerly called Heteromera ), so have 5 links on the fore and middle tarsi and 4 on the hind tarsi . They reach lengths between 2 and 17 mm. When viewed from above, your body is oval to elongated, strongly arched to somewhat flattened, it is almost bald or inconspicuously hairy. Tetratomidae are brown to black in color, in many species with orange or red spots or drawing elements, more rarely with a clear blue metallic sheen.

The head is short and roughly triangular when viewed from above, usually slightly drooping. The sensors have 11 elements and can be designed very differently. Often they have a 3 to 5-limbed loose club, but they can also be thread-like, pearl-like, sawn or combed. Some species show a clear sexual dimorphism in the construction of the antennae . The feelers are freely deflected on the sides of the head, only in a few species the deflections are slightly covered by protrusions on the side of the head. The mandibles are bidentate at the tip. The maxillae are largely reduced, the maxillary probes with four members, the labial probes with three, the first of which is short and inconspicuous.

The pronotum is clearly transverse and much wider than the head in all species, it almost reaches the width of the elytra. Its sides are sharply edged, often also its anterior margin and parts of the basal margin. The sides are usually strongly rounded. The pronotum disk is punctured or wrinkled, without ribs or furrows, but often with indentations.

The elytra are always well developed, elongated oval to parallel. As a rule, they are dotted with confused dots, only in some species the dots form rows. A label is always available. The hind wings are usually developed normally. The anterior hip cavities are open at the back; H. behind not surrounded by the fore chest. They are separated by a prosternal process . The legs are normal and of moderate length. The rails can carry oblique rows of spikes. The spines at the tip of the splints are usually quite short, only rarely do they reach half the length of the first tarsal link . The claws are simple and often somewhat thickened at the base.

Larvae

The larvae reach 4 to 18 millimeters in length. They are often elongated parallel-sided and round in cross-section and usually weakly hairy and soft-skinned (only weakly sclerotized), they are whitish to light brown in color. The head has five larval eyes (stemmata) and three-part antennae. The mandibles are always more or less asymmetrical (exception genus Tetratoma ). The larvae have long, five-limbed legs. The abdomen consists of ten segments, the ninth of which has a pair of mostly upwardly curved appendages ( urogomphi ).

biology

The larvae and adults of the beetles feed on tree fungi. They can be found under the bark in fungal wood, or hidden in tree sponges, especially in Porlingen (Polyporaceae).

distribution

The relatively species-poor family is distributed almost worldwide, with most of the species coming from Eurasia . Few come from North America , one from Chile . One genus ( Eustrophopsis ) is widespread with numerous species in the tropics of Africa and Central America. The genus is not represented in Australia .

Taxonomy

The Tetratomidae have long been regarded as a subfamily of the Melandryidae (Serropalpidae). Because of the open at the back of the anterior hip cavities, which are separated by the prosternal process, the short thorns at the ends of the splint, and features of the larvae, they have since been separated. The tribes were raised to the rank of subfamilies.

Representatives of the family were found fossil with a representative of the recent genus Tetratoma in Baltic amber (Eocene), with one representative each of the Eustrophinae from French amber from the Lower Cretaceous and from Upper Cretaceous amber from Myanmar.

swell

  • Joy, Harde, Lohse: The Beetles of Central Europe. Volume 8. Goecke & Evers, Krefeld 1969.
  • NB Nikitsky: Generic classification of the beetle family Tetratomidae (Coleoptera, Tenebrionoidea) of the world, with description of new taxa. Pensoft Series Faunistica No. 9, 1998, ISBN 954-642-039-5 .
  • Daniel K. Young, Darren A. Pollock: Tetratomidae (99th family). In: Ross H. Arnett Jr., Michael C. Thomas, Paul E. Skelley, J. Howard Frank (editors): American Beetles. Volume 2: Polyphaga: Scarabaeoidea through Curculionoidea. CRC Press, Boca Raton etc. 2002, ISBN 978 1 4200 4123 1 .
  • John F. Lawrence, Richard AB Leschen: 11.5 Tetratomidae. In: Richard AB Leschen, Rolf G. Beutel, John F. Lawrence: Handbook of Zoology. Arthropoda, Insecta, Coleoptera Beetles. Volume 2: Morphology and Systematics (Elateroidea, Bostrichiformia, Cucujiformia partim). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2010, ISBN 978-3-11-019755-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Vitaly I. Alekseev: The first species of the family Tetratomidae (Coleoptera: Cucujiformia: Tenebrionoidea) from Baltic amber. In: Journal of Coleopterology. Volume 13, No. 2, 2013, pp. 131-135.
  2. ^ Carmen Soriano, Darren Pollock, Didier Néraudeau, Andre Nel, Paul Tafforeau: First fossil record of polypore fungus beetles from Lower Cretaceous amber of France. In: Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. Volume 59, No. 4, 2014, pp. 941-946.
  3. ↑ Yali Yu, Yun Hsiao, Adam Ślipiński, Jianhua Jin, Dong Ren, Hong Pang: A new Late Cretaceous genus and species of polypore fungus beetles (Coleoptera, Tetratomidae) from northern Myanmar. In: Cretaceous Research. Volume 68, 2016, pp. 34-39, doi: 10.1016 / j.cretres.2016.08.006 .