Christmas Beetles Wanted: Australians Looking For Missing Festive Bugs

Where have all the Christmas beetles gone? This is a significant subject that scientists are asking for the public's assistance with.

The beginning of the Australian summer was once signaled by swarms of these vibrant insects, but they are now much less common.

According to the Daily Mail, individuals recall seeing these insects in great numbers around Christmas. However, that doesn't seem to happen any longer, especially on Australia's east coast.

(Photo : YURI KADOBNOV/AFP via Getty Images)
A bee-eating beetle (Trichodes apiarius) attacks a wasp (L) on flowers in a garden outside Moscow on August 1, 2021.

Christmas Beetles Missing: Scientists Remain Clueless

News articles from 1922 mention drownings in Sydney Harbour and tree limbs bending under the weight of beetle swarms during Christmas. However, the population decline since then has not been thoroughly documented.

"We don't really know what normal is anymore," Tanya Latty, an entomologist from the School of Life and Environmental Science at the University of Sydney, said in an ABC News report.

The University of Sydney and Invertebrates Australia are conducting a citizen science initiative to investigate population patterns and the causes of the anecdotal fall.

Although the experiment has been ongoing since last year, Dr. Latty is optimistic that this season will finally provide them with a picture of the population's state.

The crew has already documented five sightings of a kind of Christmas beetle this year in areas where they were last observed in the 1970s.

There are 35 species of beetles in Australia, and the iNaturalist app allows users to share photographs of them.

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Beetle Census To Search For Bugs

Reports mentioned that the Christmas beetle census aims to identify areas where the bugs are having difficulty while also creating a baseline for tracking future decreases.

Like the platypus and koala, most beetle species are unique to Australia, yet many have vanished from the continent.

Because the insects feed on eucalyptus trees and their larvae consume native grassroots, scientists believe that habitat degradation is to blame.

The larvae of the insects, which are members of the species Anoplognathus of the scarab family, aid in aerating the soil, and the beetles serve as a vital source of food for lizards, birds, and other creatures.

According to Dr. Latty, Christmas beetles might signal other species' extinction.

Australians have recently been urged to pay particular attention to local animals since their nation has the greatest rate of mammal extinction in the world.

Bug-Finding Apps

BBC News said scientists urged people to visit fire-affected regions during the Australia 2020 bushfires, where it was safe to do so, and contribute photos to the same app used for the Christmas beetle research.

As frog populations are declining, the Australian Museum also released an app called FrogID that invites users to upload recordings of frog sounds from throughout the country. More than 500,000 frog cries have been recorded thus far.