Bessbug

• The adults care for their larvae and feed them wood chewed and mixed with their own faeces, something exceptional among beetles.
• It communicates with at least fourteen distinct sounds produced by stridulation, and the larvae stridulate too, rubbing their hind legs, which are reduced and turned into sound-producing organs.
• It is a key decomposer: its galleries speed up the breakdown of fallen logs and open the way for fungi and other invertebrates.
• It talks. It produces at least fourteen distinct sounds by rubbing its wings against its abdomen, and the larvae reply with a mechanism of their own, rubbing their hind legs against the middle ones. It is one of the richest acoustic repertoires known in a beetle.
• It is subsocial: the adults live with their larvae in the same gallery, feed them pre-digested wood and repair the nest, a prolonged form of parental care that is very rare among beetles.
• It cannot digest wood on its own: it depends on its gut microbiota and on fungi that grow in the galleries.
• Its ecological role is important: it speeds up the decomposition of fallen trunks, and its galleries create microhabitat for other species.
• It is harmless and easy to keep, which is why it is routinely used in biology classes to demonstrate acoustic communication in insects.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat & environment

Fallen rotting logs of North American deciduous forest

Sources consulted: Schuster (1983); Buchler et al. (1981), Animal Behaviour; Universidad de Florida, Featured Creatures