Golden Ground Beetle

• It cannot fly: its hind wings are vestigial.
• It can eat its own weight in slugs and snails in just 24 hours.
• French farmers historically moved it from field to field for biological pest control.
• It is one of the few ground beetles with daytime habits: most of its relatives hunt by night.
• It is a voracious predator of slugs, snails, worms and insect larvae, and in agriculture it is regarded as a valuable ally; its abundance is used as an indicator of soil health in crops.
• It digests outside its body: it vomits enzymes onto its prey, liquefies it and sucks up the result.
• It does not fly: like many Carabus, it has fused elytra and atrophied wings, which makes it highly sensitive to landscape fragmentation, because it cannot cross barriers.
• Its metallic gold is also structural colour.
• It is sensitive to insecticides and to intensive tillage, and its populations have fallen in areas of industrial agriculture.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Open fields, hedgerows and gardens on clay or loam soils of central and western Europe, introduced to North America

Birth weight

Eggs laid singly or in small groups on damp ground

Size at birth

A black, long, slender larva, active mainly at dawn and dusk

Sexual maturity

Reached once metamorphosis is complete (no fixed age applies; the adults breed in their first spring after hibernating)

Gestation / incubation

A larval stage through spring and summer, with 3 instars before pupating in late summer

Litter / clutch size

Up to 50 eggs per female

Sources consulted: Entomologist.net; Animalia.bio; Biocommunication Group; SummitPost; Encyclopedia of Life; iNaturalist; Plantiary; Wikipedia (Carabus auratus, español)