This month some interesting ‘roadkill’ from the platform at Helensburgh railway station.
On the left is a Serrodes campana moth, in the family Erebidae. I saw several of these on the platform after Christmas, but forgot to photograph the good ones. This moth sucks juice from damaged fruit, often after a fruit piercing moth has initiated the damage (I wrote about the fruit piercing moth a while ago). Like the fruit piercing moth, 30 years ago Serrodes campana was considered a northern species, not known from south of Coffs Harbour. Now I see from the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) that mine is not the first in this area – there have been a few recent records.
No doubt it’s another example of the effect of global warming – I know of many northern species which have spread south, but nothing southern that has spread north.
The other insect in this photo is a large prionine longhorn beetle. This had been eaten or pecked at the side, so I removed all the eggs that were filling the abdomen – that’s those seed-like things. The poor beetle was probably about to lay. Prionines are generally boring brown, a bit flat, a bit spiny and very large. They can bite so need to be handled with care (if alive).
The largest Australian beetles are probably prionines and the longest beetle in the world belongs to this group. By longest I mean longest body, without including horns or antennae or legs. For many years this was thought to be a species of prionine on Viti Levu in Fiji, but slightly larger species are now known from the Amazon, including the Titan beetle, at 16cm body length.
Adult prionines do not feed (their jaws are used for exiting the pupal chamber) and only live a few days. I wrote about a large moth with the same absurd life history in a previous article. It must be a size thing – if you are OS you are easy pickings for the birds, so deny them a chance by dying quickly.
The Australian prionine fauna was poorly known until recently, partly because adults are relatively rare. My colleagues in CSIRO have revised the group and found many new species and genera. I think the specimen in my photo is one of their new genera, Hagrides, named after Hagrid in Harry Potter.