Burying Beetle

• It is one of the very few insects in which both parents care for the young: together they bury the carcass, strip off hair and feathers, mould it into a ball, coat it in antimicrobial secretions to slow decay, and then feed the larvae on pre-digested flesh.
• It practises selective infanticide: it adjusts the number of larvae to the size of the carcass, because the eggs are laid before the female can gauge how much food there is.
• It is the best-studied burying beetle in the world, with more than a thousand scientific citations and a sequenced genome; it is used as a model species for studying the evolution of parental care.
• It buries corpses in order to breed. The pair locate a dead mouse or bird by the volatiles it gives off, drag it to a suitable spot, strip off its fur or feathers, shape it into a ball and bury it.
• And it preserves it. They coat it with anal and oral secretions with antimicrobial activity: corpses treated this way do not decompose and develop far fewer bacteria and fungi. One analysis identified 34 compounds in those secretions.
• The main active substance has lysozyme properties, and it has been proposed that it derives from digestive gut enzymes repurposed as an external defence. This is what is known as social immunity.
• And they regulate the dose: the antimicrobial strength of the secretion is adjusted to the perceived microbial threat, because producing it carries a cost and competes with their own individual immunity.
• It shows biparental care, something exceedingly rare in non-social insects: both parents defend the corpse and feed the larvae by regurgitating food to them, and in doing so they pass on their gut microbiota.
• It travels with mites of the genus Poecilochirus clinging to its body, which breed alongside it on the corpse.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat & environment

European woodland and peat bogs. It is found wherever there are carcasses of small vertebrates: birds fallen from the nest, rodents and small mammals

Gestation / incubation

The eggs hatch a few days after laying

Litter / clutch size

Several dozen eggs laid in the soil around the underground chamber where the carcass has been buried

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (Nicrophorus vespilloides); Cunningham, Benowitz y Moore 2024, Ecology and Evolution 14; Pascoal y Kilner 2017, PeerJ 5; El desinsectador y desratizador; Animalandia (Comunidad de Madrid)

Best time: From April to autumn, with a peak of activity in May and a second rise in late summer